Transcript
[0:00] Hello and welcome to Mythmakers. Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding. I'm an author, but I also run the activities of our centre. And today I'm delighted to be joined by a name that's probably well known to many of you. Samantha Shannon has joined us because she has just published, thanks to Bloomsbury, the 10th anniversary edition of The Bone Season. It's a fantastic hardback. If you like hardbacks, this is the one to put on your wishlist. I always like reading a real book from time to time and this was very enjoyable. So welcome, Samantha.
[0:43] Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. So let's start right back at your beginnings as a reader, really, probably more than a writer. Later what were the fantasy authors that you were reading as your entry to the world of fantasy who were the authors that really lit the spark for you you know i always struggle with this question because i have quite a poor long-term memory so i'm sure that my entire childhood just lies in the midst of time somewhere um i do distinctly remember reading a lot of c.s lewis when i was a kid i remember going to uh like a family holiday to tunisia and i took like the entire set of the Chronicles of Narnia with me. And I just pretty much stayed inside the hotel reading them the whole time, which probably drove my parents insane because they'd clearly paid for us to have a nice holiday inside with C.S. Lewis.
[1:32] I did read Tolkien at quite a young age. I read The Hobbit. I read The Lord of the Rings a little bit later, but I loved The Hobbit when I was a kid.
[1:42] I read Enid Blyton, The Magic Faraway Tree. When I was more in my teens, I read Garth Nix, who has the most yeah he has this incredible series called the Aborsen trilogy um and that was kind of what got me back into fantasy after I started thinking that there wasn't really a place for me in it um I felt like when I was young I felt that it was quite a masculine genre and that I wasn't really seeing any women get to take the lead in many fantasy novels just as the solo lead and Garth Nix really changed that for me because when I first read Sabriel you know that she's the main character to the point that the whole story is her name and I just loved how Garth Nix dealt with her being a woman in this world like you know people respect her for the skill that she has you know she's not treated any differently from being a woman because I think it can be quite a hostile genre to women in some areas particularly when it comes to misogyny within the genre so yeah Garth Nix really changed that for me a lot so I credit him with bringing me into fantasy in a really big time when I was a teenager.
[2:48] And yeah, it's just kind of only got into more of a fixation from there. I think fantasy is the genre that I feel like I really belong in. Yeah, I'm just thinking Lirial as well, the lady in the series, got the most wonderful library in it. But again, another different, strong female protagonist. Yeah, that's really interesting. Perhaps we should, I'm tempted to go down the rabbit hole of asking you about the misogyny, but that would not get us to the bone season. So let's go straight there.
[3:19] It's the 10th anniversary. So my maths allows me to work out that it came out in 2014. 14 2013 so technically the 10th anniversary was last year okay right more or less so you have a number of chunky fantasy novels under your belt as well as an extensive series in the bone season i'll just also show another book many of our readers listeners will be familiar with which is the priory of the orange tree which is a separate series just so people don't get confused um so when you were coming back to the bone season for its 10th anniversary can you were you having sort of visions of the the younger you writing it and what were you thinking about that book as you came to revise it and expand it for its anniversary edition it was a really interesting cathartic process going back to it so the this came about because bloomsbury wanted to do a new cover for the 10th anniversary edition
[4:15] and i wrote the bone season when i was very young I really started it when I was 19. I published it when I was 21, just after I graduated from Oxford. And I think it was an incredibly ambitious, huge idea. And I think my ambition outstripped my writing ability at the time. I was also trying to do a degree at the same time as writing it. And also there was a lot of media interest in me during my first year after I signed my book deal because of my age.
[4:46] And all of this meant that I felt like I couldn't really give the edit on The Bone Season the focus that it fully deserved. And if it had just been a standalone novel, I wouldn't have really thought anything of it. I think that each book we write is a kind of time capsule that represents the writing we were at that time. And I think that's normally fine. But The Bone Season is a series I'm still working on now. So bear in mind, I started it when I was 19 and I'm now 32.
[5:13] And my writing has changed a lot since then. My opinions on things have changed a lot. And I still love The Bone Season so much. I still have three more books in the series to publish. And it was an unusual situation where I'm still writing a book over a series over a decade after I wrote the first book. And so I suggested to my publisher, you know, how would you feel if I edited the first book? And it's unusual because generally when you publish a book, you are not allowed to ever edit it again. It just is what it is. It's out there. But Bloomsbury were actually quite amenable to the idea, I think, because they could see that I was so passionate about it and that I had been
[5:52] wanting to do it for such a long time. Because I feel that the first book in the Bone Season series, I just felt like it had so much more potential than my younger self had quite known how to tap into. There's a lot of really interesting character dynamics and situations. And whenever I was reading it back to myself, I kept thinking, oh, why didn't you do this? Why didn't you dig into that relationship a bit more? Why didn't you make this joke that's quite clearly there and you just haven't done it? And yeah, to my surprise, Bloomsbury let me do it. And then I just decided to apply that to the whole series because it was being rejacketed with these beautiful new covers by Ivan Belikov. Yeah, it was fascinating.
[6:32] Bloomsbury did not know specifically what I wanted to do with it, which meant that I was my only editor. Obviously, all of the books have already been professionally edited. So I was going through it with the perspective of specifically what I wanted to do. And it was like I was in conversation with my younger self. So sometimes I was cringing a little bit just when I saw a sentence that was a bit clunky and clearly needed another go um but generally it was just very it was kind of lovely and cathartic and I stopped being actually very proud of my younger self because considering how young I was you know to have this huge world in my head even back then I don't think I could come up with a world like the bone season now I think I'm being 30 has just exhausted my brain too much um but yeah it was it was just it was really fun I enjoyed it in the end.
[7:18] I'm just sitting here shocked that you think 30 is kind of like, sorry, I'm quite a bit further on than you. No, I'm just a very tired 30-year-old. You're still young to me. So does this mean, Samantha, that you went straight from doing a degree? Was that a degree in English, Bunny?
[7:34] Yeah, English language literature, yeah. Yeah. So did you go straight from that straight into being a full-time writer without passing go, without stopping? I did. Yeah, I did. I was very lucky that Bloomsbury, you know, they invested in my career at a very early point. And I got signed up originally for the first three books in the Bone Season series. But because the Bone Season had so much media interest, it became a New York Times bestseller, you know, straight off the bat, which meant that Bloomsbury very quickly bought the other four books in the series. So yeah, they were very supportive. So there wasn't, yeah, I had previously worked other sort of student type jobs. But yeah, I was very lucky you that I was able to go straight into my dream job which was lovely yeah so did you find having that media spotlight on you because I was reading some remarks back from then when you know the plastic thing in that decade I don't think it happened so much now was oh the next JK Rowling you know all this stuff I would have found that quite hard in your situation just trying to keep perspective on because you're not like JK Rowling at all as a writer it's there's no if you're a a Harry Potter fan you're not immediately going to say oh yeah I find everything I want in the bone suit it's a different atmosphere entirely how did you did you I suppose I'm asking were you able to navigate that without falling out of love with the whole business of writing not the act of writing but the publishing world because they do kind of love you for a bit and then leave you.
[9:00] Yes. And it's actually, I think, quite remarkable, again, how aware I was of danger of that label, because I think it can be quite easy to get swept away with people telling you how brilliant you are and how you're this prodigy. And weirdly, I never believed it. I was always very nervous about it. And I would actively say to interviewers, you know, I'm not J.K. Rowling. This isn't Harry Potter. And, you know, J.K. Rowling was essentially a once-in-a-generation phenomenon in some regard, like it's you can't really say to a debut writer you're going to sell as many copies as harry potter because that's just it's not a realistic expectation of anyone and i think that the comparison between me and jk rowling was quite shallow on the surface it was because we are both british women who were publishing with bloomsbury and both had fantasy books that would comprise seven installments and i really think that was it i don't think there was it wasn't really deeper but it ended up getting slightly out of control. And I just had this label of the next JK Rowling for well over a year. And the other thing I noticed that was quite dangerous was that I was constantly being praised for how young I was. And the thing about age is that it's finite. It goes quite quickly. They don't feel young for very long in publishing.
[10:14] I think it lasted until I was maybe 22 or 23, and then I stopped being called young. And I was very, very conscious of that. I was thinking if they're pitching me as my unique selling point is that I'm young, I've got a maximum of maybe three years before that runs out and I was keenly aware of that danger.
[10:32] And I did not, I don't think I fell out of love with the process of publishing. I mean, it was perhaps because I just hadn't done it before and I hadn't had time to be jaded by it. And, you know, I wanted this so badly. It was the dream I've had since I was a little kid was to be a writer. I used to literally wish on stars, please, please make me a writer.
[10:50] But my mental health suffered enormously just because of the amount of pressure. I mean, I was a very, very shy, introverted, stereotypical writer, you know, hiding in her room writing in her book when she probably should have been out clubbing at uni. And I was really, really overwhelmed by the amount of intense interest in me. And it really was quite extraordinary. I actually spoke to someone the other day who did part of her dissertation on the phenomenon around me before I was even published. And that's strange as well, because I knew that it wasn't about the book, this interest. It was about me specifically.
[11:28] And that was strange. And I have looked back on that year or two of my life, and especially from the perspective of being a young woman, I found it interesting because I would look back on the way I was photographed, for example, by publications. And I would just think would a man be photographed like that I don't think so would a man be able to talk about their arts and not about all this sort of their personal life I don't know I found it I did find it a quite a gendered experience in some ways but yeah it was it was troubling I had I pretty much had a slight mental breakdown towards the end of my final year at university and had to leave for a couple of weeks before one of my exams um I you know I'm glad that I've come through that and I feel much better now that I have a readership who stuck with me throughout that and I feel way better now that I've actually got books that people can read and people are talking about the books rather than me yeah and I I'm I'm when I first my first books were published in 2006 I had a year or two of something not as big as that but similar where I was picked out on a list of um what was it 25 authors of the future it was and I was the children's right because I was writing for kids at the time. And I was there with Robert McFarlane and all sorts of other people with great big profiles for some newspaper splash.
[12:48] But I was also a bit older. I was in my early 30s, plus I was married, plus I had young kids and I'd had a previous career. So all of these things, I think, helped steady me because I had come to it after a, you know been in other careers with other colleagues and had other identities i think you've done brilliantly well to survive that fresh out of uni because i think it's like being an actor that time when you're the you're the name everyone wants to employ it's it's it can kill people can kill off their sort of desire for doing the thing that they're doing yeah very negotiated it really well so let's go back to the book rather than the phenomenon around the book um i i was listening to the there's a great scholar of c.s lewis called michael ward a lecture um just the other day and he was talking about how c.s lewis had the idea that he wrote about which is that stories have like two main elements like very basic elements one is obviously the words which like the plot and that kind of thing but also something he called the kappa which is like the the secret atmosphere in the book. It's like a mood.
[14:01] It's not even as developed as a theme. It's a sort of the world, as you go through Narnia into the frosty world, that's your atmosphere. When you were thinking about the bone season, were you aware of having some mood or theme that you were wanting to explore when you were 19?
[14:22] Or did you find it when you went back to look at it 10 years later? And think, oh, yeah, that's what I was thinking, even though I didn't know it at the time.
[14:30] Oh, that's such an interesting question. I'm not really sure in terms of atmosphere. I mean, the Bone Season was two very different ideas coming together. And one of them was magical and one of them was dark. And I suppose I wanted to capture both of those things. It was really two of my favorite genres coming together. So one of them is the dystopia, which is where the dark and the gritty atmosphere comes in. And one of them was epic fantasy. And I've always love the scope of epic fantasy and what i find really fascinating about the two genres is they always do opposite things in some way so dystopia usually when you read a dystopian novel it is quite restrictive so it's contained to one small community and often that's very much the point if you think of something like um divergent for example yeah it's all set within chicago well i mean not the last book but it's this very contained controlled environment and i was really interested in what happens when you bring the two genres together so what if you had an epic dystopia when you see both inside and outside the dystopian world and i think one of the inspirations behind that was margaret atwood's the handmaid's tale and there's a really curious bit in that where tourists come into this you know horrendous misogynistic world that she's constructed and they're looking into offred's world as tourists from the outside and i found that really interesting because I hadn't really seen that in dystopia before.
[15:52] So I did want to capture this kind of dark, stomach-churning feeling that dystopia has kind of provoked in me. But also, I love the magic of fantasy as well, and I wanted to inject that into the genre. So yeah, in a way, it's two very different atmospheres pulling against each other. And I think Oxford was a great place for that because there there is a lot of magic in it you know it has this this reputation as being this incredible you know beautiful place but then for me in my mental state it was a much darker place so yeah there's two atmospheres kind of vibrating against each other throughout the text, I was thinking about the use of Oxford in it. I moved out of Oxford about two years ago, but I'd lived there for a very long time as an Oxfordian or a normal person in Oxford. After I finished my doctorate, I was then just there as a normal folk. And one of the interesting things I think about Oxford when it appears in novels is the story about Oxford that people choose to tell because very often it's about this university, and obviously because of your experience of Oxford at that stage was that.
[17:06] I was wondering if you felt that the Oxford University side of it was the seed of your idea or the soil in which it grew that was the way I was thinking about it, Yeah, so like I said, it really was two separate ideas coming together, but I suppose I could have chosen to set the bulk of it in London rather than Oxford. And London is where we go in the first sequel, The Mime Order. So essentially it was the fantasy aspect of it came from London and the more dystopian element came from Oxford. And partly that is because my mental health was not great the entire time I was at Oxford, even before I had my book deal. I did feel very much like an odd fit there. I felt like a bit of an outsider. I come from a state school, not a grammar school or anything, just like a normal state school. And I did feel very out of my depth. I knew people, for example, who had been able to learn latitude at school. I didn't have that opportunity.
[18:03] So I felt this slight fear and anxiety pretty much the whole time I was there
[18:08] because I was just so sure that I wasn't really good enough.
[18:10] I was suffering from terrible imposter syndrome oh completely yeah yeah and that's a very familiar story you're telling here yeah and it didn't really help when I didn't do especially well um in my first year exams my prelims and then you get sorted into either the scholars or the commoners I went into the commoners which I still think is kind of terrible when you think about it for too long um but yeah so some of the dystopian elements did come from the Oxford exam system so the uh the the tunics that the characters wear for example when they pass their tests they're white pink and red which is after the carnations that students wear for exams um and yeah just generally i was walking around the city looking at these beautiful old colleges and just imagining them as residences for these kind of powerful creatures that had control over the lives of these young people that have been shepherded in there um and yeah so i suppose oxford just was the natural setting for the first book in the series where Paige discovers this darkness behind her world and this the place it's kind of a place when I talked about Oxford in the essay I wrote for the Waterstone special edition I mentioned that Oxford is a place that is associated with power and privilege that is not shared equally and I suppose that is kind of one of the themes of this story is about power and who holds it and how Paige kind of slowly draws power back throughout the narrative so yeah Yeah, I think it was the natural seed in which to plant the story.
[19:37] Despite the fact that the influence also came from London.
[19:41] The next question I was going to ask you about the light to the darkness probably does actually fit also with that description you're making of it being a book that came from two ideas of the epic fantasy and the dystopian. But were you consciously looking for times to provide the solace? I guess it's what I'm looking at, the solace and the humor.
[20:07] Because it's not an And it's not an unrelentingly bleak read. You know, I don't want people to go and say, oh, I can't read that. It's too depressing.
[20:14] It's not that read. It's got lots of wonderful details and inventive moments. But where do you find the lightness in that world? Let's ask the question that way around. Oh, so the main one is, to me, just the character of Paige. When she came into my head, I really wanted her to be someone that the reader wanted to have them leading them through this dark world and Paige can be serious you know she can you know she she has a lot of moments in the book where she's very heroic and steps up to the plate but she is also quite a naturally funny character and she can see the humor in her situation and one thing I did in the anniversary edition is I added a moment where she and her friend Julian who've just been taken to Oxford and imprisoned there they have this moment where they kind of acknowledge their situation and then just burst out laughing because it's it's kind of horrific but it's also ridiculous and absurd and I just wanted them to have that moment where they just laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation so I think Paige is someone who has you know a bit of a sense of humor she does see the kind of dark comedy in most situations in.
[21:27] For me, I knew that Paige was going to be the perspective that we saw the entire seven book series with. Therefore, she couldn't be someone who was too serious because otherwise the reader would just find it too overwhelming.
[21:40] Paige, for me, is the person who keeps the reader afloat in that sense. I also did, like I say, want to tap into some of the magic of fantasy as well. Paige has this gift. She's a dreamwalker, which means that she can leave her own body and jump into other people and possess them. But there is a kind of wonder in that gift that she has. And she also loves her home in the criminal underworld where there are all these kind of very flamboyant, exuberant characters, the crime lords of London that she remembers. So I did want to show the reader why she loves being clairvoyant and the sense of community that she gets from being part of that world.
[22:23] So there's a scene, for example, when it comes to the magic of her gift, where she enters the dreamscape, which is kind of like the mind of a butterfly, and just sees how extraordinarily beautiful it is, because butterflies see in very vivid colour. And she just has this amazing moment where she knows what it's like to be a butterfly. So it's just those little moments of wonder that I try to inject into the story, um I think help carry you through the darker parts hopefully but that's not a precious moment though because she uh in their sense of being too twee because she gets catapulted out of being a butterfly and oh yeah it's always like little moments in the bone season you get a little bit of happiness for about five minutes and then I take it away again um it's not so I think it's quite funny um that big person trying to be a butterfly I mean it's just the she's horrible Yeah, she realises that she doesn't even know how to breathe as a butterfly because they don't have a lot of...
[23:17] But yeah, I remember when I was writing the fifth book in the series, which I've just finished pretty much, there is a moment where I take Paige and one of her, some of the other characters out of the horror for a few chapters and just give them this time to spend together. And I knew that it was a little bit odd in terms of the pace of the story that I just take Paige out and I thought my editor was going to say something about it and then she just said you know what I think Paige just deserves a break I mean we kind of agreed so yeah it's like a little holiday so I'm glad that we came to that agreement together.
[23:54] I think for me the other area I found the likeness other than in page was in the friendships and the courage so julian and liss um and nick uh these other characters who are in her world um you feel that she's loved and very often in dystopian novels that people are it's so cruel that people aren't really able to love each other which i suppose is the you know 1984 it gets to that point doesn't it it's the most depressing part of it. Yes. Yeah. And I think you've kept alive that.
[24:30] The the i don't know so the rewards of of human um bravery love and loyalty so i'm glad yeah it's very much about found family in that respect because page's own family has really been taken away from her um by scion and by the circumstances that she survived um so it was important to me that she does have this kind of um just yeah this kind of motley crew around her who act as her family and that a sense of family that goes beyond being related to each other by blood and yeah I did really love writing characters like Liss who is just a fundamentally very kind person despite the fact that she has been so downtrodden and so just you know she has lost a lot of hope but she has kept that fundamental sense of kindness about her and yeah I mean if the characters aren't fighting for some you know some kind of light or love it would be difficult for me to write so yeah she's she's definitely fighting to protect the people that she loves and who love her back so here's a kind of more of a craft question um because one thing that sets apart a fantasy writer from say a historical novelist is that you'll be doing a lot of world building rather than research into a particular you know historical
[25:48] moment so looking Looking back at your, however you do your work.
[25:54] The new edition has a very helpful glossary and explanation of your world at the back. It looks very organized.
[26:03] So you've got very neat notebooks with all this in. Is that true? Or is it all just an emergent world, which you've then made an index for?
[26:13] Neither, actually. So it's not emergent. I do definitely plan the story. But in terms of world building and it always horrifies people when I tell them this it's pretty much all in my head I have, an extraordinarily detailed memory when it comes to my own worlds. The sacrifice I make is that I can't remember basic stuff about my everyday life. I will not remember to, you know, get the boiler serviced, but I will remember random little details about my own world. So yeah, I just seem to have a very good memory for that kind of detail.
[26:46] In terms of plot, I do definitely plan that out. I would, I very much admire my colleagues who can write stories just on the fly. And I think there can be upsides to that. I think that it means that you're not trying to force the character to do something that doesn't fit with their personality. I think you can cause them to react to things in the moment and you can develop their character based on that. For me, writing a seven-book book series like the bone season I don't think I could not planned it I mean certainly my plans have changed over time like originally book five was supposed to have this whole sort of, pregnancy storyline that it does not have anymore um so I have really drastically changed some parts of it but I have always broadly known where it was going for me I compare it to if you're just wandering around with a map but you don't have a destination then you're not really going to get anywhere you can explore but to me I like to have the destination in mind and then that little bit of flexibility to choose how you get to your destination you know you could potentially take a few different routes but I like to know who the character needs to be by the end of this novel so that I can get them there and I am a very chronological writer as well I can't skip ahead to write scenes because I need to live everything with Paige so I know how she's reacting and who she's becoming.
[28:12] But yeah, definitely planned in terms of the main events of the story, what I know I'm going to reveal in each book, that sort of thing.
[28:20] Yeah, I can't imagine how else you'd keep hold of a seven-part series otherwise.
[28:26] I mean, there have been examples like The Wheel of Time, which took a while to get through to the conclusion. And of course, Game of Thrones, and also The Name of the Wind. And I imagine those writers, certainly in the case of George R.R. Martin and Patrick Rofus, maybe are more emergent in their thinking i don't know i know i know martin has described himself as being a gardener rather than an architect where he called walkie an architect which i found interesting and i guess i can't remember exactly how he described the gardener but i think it was kind of pruning things as they come up i suppose um but yeah i i think it is good to have some degree of planning. I would be interested to know how Martin and Rothfuss approached planning, particularly.
[29:20] Tolkien was an architect as it came to his larger legendarium, the stuff that's in The Silmarillion. But when he was writing The Lord of the Rings, he was totally emergent. Oh, really? I didn't know where that was going. No.
[29:33] There's a new edition of his letters just come out, which are fantastic. It coincided with the second world war where he was both a full-time professor doing night duty for fire watch and the rest of it and writing lord of the rings and there's several times where he's just saying oh you know i'm going to put this aside not going to do this and you're saying no don't you know history is fortunately he had um his son christopher and cs lewis didn't allow him to stop but he he didn't know he didn't have a plan so um another sort of crafty question is the choice of approach so um the bone season you've mentioned it's from page's point of view and it's very much for its first person from her point of view um whereas the prairie of the orange tree which is definitely on the epic fantasy um scale that has a series of interconnected points of view in third person but geographically spread with a sort of interweaving of stories and coming together, was that because you wanted to shake it up you know give yourself a different sort of scope and chance to write a different sort of story how did you come to I think it's entirely natural that you'd want to change but let me let you answer that how you came to you know do a shift in your approach there.
[30:55] Sure. When I was younger, I always wrote in limited third person perspective. I don't recall ever not writing in that way. And so I was quite surprised when I came up with the basic premise of the bone season. And I just suddenly heard this voice in my head just saying, I like to imagine there are more of us in the beginning, which is the first line in the bone season. So I being the first word. And that was very interesting because I had never, never written in first person. And And her voice came to me so strongly, just almost out of nowhere.
[31:29] And it felt right. It does come with its challenges. Both of them come with their challenges. So with first person, just from Paige's perspective, the main challenge is that you don't know what the other characters are thinking, what they're doing all the time. So all of these characters have to be built through Paige, which means that those characters have to come into contact with Paige quite a lot. And it's interesting with the villain, for example, because page can't really be near the antagonist too much because the antagonist really wants to kill her so i have to try to build this character from a distance that page can't often be that close to um but at the same time i like the challenge of writing from page's perspective um i i don't know i just i i enjoy just i enjoy the challenge of trying to build the other characters through her obviously it's up to the reader to determine how successful i am at doing that but I yeah I it's it's something that I've really enjoyed working on the series and like I say I think it's it makes it feel a bit more grounded it allows me to build a large world perhaps without overwhelming the reader because it has to all be filtered through page.
[32:37] Who is not like a self-insert of the reader in a way that I think some protagonists are, where they're kept kind of deliberately, they're not given too much character so the reader can put themselves in their place. That's not the kind of character Paige is intended to be. But I think because she is just one solo first-person protagonist, she does hopefully assist the reader in walking through the world because she is essentially a kind of avatar that they can now see through.
[33:03] With Priory of the Orange Tree, again, it brings advantages and challenges. Um having four or five disrespected characters allows me to explore a lot more of the world to build a much bigger world um i can you know have multiple countries being shown at the same time show the same event and what effect it's having in multiple places um yeah again it's it's i suppose it's challenging just because you have to distinguish all the voices from each other i really want the reader to open the page and know straight away whose head they're in yeah that is easier in the third person I really admire writers who write multiple first person perspectives because I think that's deeply deeply difficult um to distinguish the I voice multiple times and I'm not sure it's something that I'm brave enough to attempt at this point in my career um but yeah and I think I think the bone season with only having Paige does work as well because it is just set in our world it is an alternate version of our world but you're in countries trees that you recognize you know you're hearing about page being in france or uh kind of england you there's landmarks that exist in our world so i think it's a bit easier to filter that just through one person whereas the priori the orange tree is a big although it is inspired by our world the countries are their own places with their own history so in a way i need multiple voices to introduce the reader to that much of a big new secondary world.
[34:28] Yeah that makes absolute sense and but it's but the problem about that of course is finding a way of twine entwining them together thinking back to um the Tolkien example the Amazon series Rings of Power has that problem it's got so many disparate storylines finding how they connect yeah it's I'll be interested to see how they deal with that in season two actually um yeah so in fact in A Day of Fall and Night which is the pre-quarter priory there was a scene where I really wanted all four four of the main perspective characters to come together and I just could not get one of them there it just would not make sense for her to be on a glacier like miles away from where she's supposed to be um so I kind of imagined her being there in spirit like she's has like a mental connection to one of the characters who are there but I managed to entwine you know three of the storylines at
[35:18] that point prior to the orange tree I do actually manage to get all.
[35:21] Four of them in one place which I was very proud of but it does take quite a lot of work and fiddling and there was another scene in A Day of Fallen Night where there's a character called Wolf and I really really needed him to be on a battlefield at a particular time but he was so far away from this battlefield and I could not work out how to get him there so originally there was this slightly unhinged scene where he has to ride a dragon to get there but people do not ride the fire-breathing dragons in the world of priory so I had to kind of debate with my editor and then I had to change the timeline so that he could get there he had more time to get there and it was just a I managed it in the end but it was a bit of a balancing act but fun that sounds like fun.
[36:04] Very much so so um going back to Tolkien he talked about um him him seeing his work as applicable to our world but not allegorical because people at that time back in the 50s were trying to make the ring to be a nuclear weapon you know that kind of simple yeah and that annoyed him like no end but he was very happy with the idea that you as a reader could apply it to what happens when some very large powerful weapon is invented i wondered about the bone season um because when you come back to work 10 years later you are coming back really as a reader primarily aren't you did you see things that you felt were applicable in it to our present moment.
[36:51] Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think I broadly agree with Tolkien's view on allegory. I actually went through his letters again quite recently to look at examples of where he spoke about allegory and pretty much everything he was saying I agreed with. So there's a moment where he talks about the darkness of the present days has had some effect on it, though it is not an allegory. I've already had one letter from America asking for an authoritative exposition on the allegory of the hobbit and i think that the idea of like an authoritative exhibition i think this it's a reductive idea that there is one single true meaning behind the text that all readers should be scrabbling to uncover what the meaning is and i i agree with tolkien i don't think that's particularly helpful or a great way to look at fiction or indeed a great way to write fiction i think that if you're trying to if you have a very obvious allegory i think it can feel or very didactic, and it feels like there's no room for the reader to bring their own interpretation or the applicability, like you might say. And the thing I love about writing fiction is that every single reader will view it through the lens of their own experiences.
[38:02] And I can't possibly know what those experiences are when I write the text. And it has been fascinating speaking to readers of The Bone Season. I haven't heard many comments about the allegory. I did have someone ask me once if it was supposed to represent the queer experience. I think the idea was because all the voyants have different aura colours, so they kind of form a rainbow altogether. So was it supposed to be an allegory for the persecution of queer people throughout history? History um and i would not i would you know i wouldn't want to say did i write it with that intention no but that doesn't mean that your view on it is incorrect that is your interpretation of it and i don't want my interpretation of it to be so obvious that it forces out the other.
[38:47] Interpretations so yeah i very much agree that applicability is important there's another thing i wrote down that tolkien said he said there is a moral i suppose in any tale worth telling but that is not the same thing. And he's referring to allegory there. And I agree that often, I mean, you almost can't write fiction without your own morals and opinions being used into it in some way. So yes, the bone season has a lot of ideas I agree with, like, you know, you should not mistreat people based on something that they can't control. That's a very fundamental belief I have.
[39:21] But, you know, I wouldn't want to specify it to a particular historical event or a particular particular situation in the real world. Because ultimately, it is supposed to be a story and it's something that is enjoyable and it's not supposed to be an exact mirroring of our world. But certainly, if you have a story that can be applied to the real world, sure, that's great. I don't have any issue with that. I think that is often the mark of a strong narrative. If it allows a lot of people to connect with it and see their own lives and experiences reflected in it, then that's great so what's next you've mentioned that you have um just finished the fifth book which presumably is now going to go into the edit process or is it already in the edit process it's in the edit process so i've got a couple more proofreads on it i think but it's it's taken shape as the final book and are you finding um.
[40:17] Different themes and challenges for page evolving during i don't want to ask you too much so you give away what's going on but just as she's obviously getting older and her position in the power structure is getting more um which is rising in a certain way as well as being knocked back you know there's a sort of are you thinking that you are um touching on other themes which which aren't apparent from the bone season?
[40:45] Yeah, I always remember I read a review of the bone season when it first came out and somebody said something along the lines of, I don't see where she can take the story from here. It feels finished. For me, I was like, no, no, no, very much. This is so much bigger than people realised. And I think that the first book doesn't necessarily let on how much bigger it's going to get. But in this one, Paige is actually taken very much out of her comfort zone because this is the first time that we leave the Republic of Scion, which is something I always wanted to do was to show different parts within Scion, but also take page outside it. So she's now in the free world for the first time since she was eight years old. And that was really interesting because she has learned to survive in Scion, but really doesn't know how to survive outside it at this point. And she has this curious sensation where she thinks of her comfort level in relation to how much closer she's getting to Sion which is this dystopian you know tyrannical state but she feels completely out of her depth outside it so that's been without any spoilers it's been a really interesting situation for me to explore with Paige and yeah a lot of fun given that she has been steadily creeping up the ladder and now she's essentially doesn't really know what to do with herself but yeah she's it's kind of the book where for me the fourth and the fifth book are where Paige is at her low point and then she starts going back up again.
[42:09] Because you are considerably younger, that idea of the oddness of being outside a structure like that reminds me of what I was when I was growing up. It was all about the Iron Curtain. And if you met people who'd come from Eastern Europe, their idea of what was normal and what was level and comfort was entirely different from, again, free will, but in our political terms rather than in your literary terms. So i'd be very interested to read that and and see yeah because that was a lot of people i was meeting in the early 90s that was their experience i was just living in poland as a british diplomat and the changes society was going under that time absolutely fascinating things that i had taken as, obvious like you have charities um wasn't normal there because everything provided by the state oh yeah things like the samaritans and all that kind of stuff help lines was a new concept um and you just have to stop and think okay i'm taking so much for granted about my point of view um and this person has had an entirely different set of options fascinating so um, savannah that's been absolutely fascinating so just as we come out of this discussion it'd be great if you had a fantasy tip to our listeners something that you think they might enjoy reading or watching or even a tip about writing that you value as something that really helps you.
[43:38] You know, in terms of writing advice, I'm actually so terrible at this. And I think I put my finger on why recently. And I think it's because I'm totally self-taught. So I feel like I wasn't taught how to write and therefore how to express how to write to other people, which is something I'm trying to wrestle with recently. In terms of a general tip, mine actually relates to music. So something that really inspires me is listening to instrumental music, particularly film scores. Scores and often film scores they've been obviously made to express a particular emotion or a particular pace and I find that so helpful when I'm writing fiction so so many of my playlets are just like the scores of action films or you know anything that is a film that reminds me of the book I'm trying to write or a scene that I'm trying to write putting the score on in the background I find really helpful it's very different from music with lyrics because for For me, music with lyrics, I struggle to write to that because the lyrics give it a story, so that clashes with my story. But instrumental music allows you to capture the atmosphere or the pace or anything else, but apply your own story to it. So that would be my main writing tip. Brilliant, thank you. I totally agree with you there.
[44:52] I sometimes make playlists for characters with music, with lyrics, but I'm not listening to that while writing that character. It's just more like an aid memoir as to what kind of person they are oh absolutely same yeah so we always finish by asking where in all the fantasy worlds is the best place for something and in honor of the bone season i thought we would talk about where is the best place to have an extra sensory perception gift um and just before we started recording you were saying i don't think there's anywhere good to go with that so have you come up with somewhere where actually you'd be safe and happy or interesting to have a gift like that. I have to really rack my brains. I feel like there must be a few books I've
[45:36] read where it's a good idea to have magic. But I think often in fiction, it's either that magic users are very revered, but I feel like they're rarer than books where magic is feared and where magic users are persecuted in some way. I could think I think of a few where you maybe could find a place if you had an extra subject to give. So there's Her Majesty's Royal Coven by Juno Dawson, which kind of has a government department of witches, which is internally deeply flawed in various ways. But you, I suppose, could technically use, you know, if you could get into the right administration.
[46:13] I just finished a book which is coming out in 2025 called The Notorious Virtues by Orwin Hamilton. And that one's really interesting because it has one family of magic users who have hoarded all of the magic and the wealth in this community. So I suppose if you were a member of that family, it would be okay. Yeah, and other magic users do exist. It's just that they've kind of taken the lion's share of it.
[46:39] But the way that magic is used in that book is really interesting. Saying I would definitely recommend it when it comes out and then similarly there's another book which is coming out in October called Until We Shatter by Kate Dillon and again like there's some areas in which magic users are persecuted but there's this city where people can use magic that corresponds to different colors and there's something called the Council of Shades which kind of they they revere magic as long as you're not a certain kind of magic user there always seems to be kind of caveats when magic is accepted fantasy um but yeah I suppose those there aren't there's probably a very obvious example that I'm missing but those are the only three that I could think of off the top of my head you don't want to have it in the bone season basically yeah you know it's problematic though being without it is also problematic isn't it you know very much so yeah as long as you find your little niche in the bone season world in the criminal underworld you can
[47:33] you can have a good time with it but you have to stay out of the way of the forces of power. So my pick for this is, I actually wrote a whole series under my pen name, Joss Sterling, the seventh series, which is a YA series starting in about, when did I start that? About 2009, I think. And the first one of that is called Finding Sky. It's contemporary setting and a lot of people who know me as a writer, that's the series they love because...
[48:02] Um the savants are like a secret society working within our contemporary world and it has an element of fated love in it as well um so it's a good well it's a good world to be have esp, but somebody else's world i think i would pick um well there's lots of good places to be a witch isn't there if we think which being a witch having those kind of gifts is similar yeah i mean i I wouldn't mind being James Nichols, who's one of our tutors, one of our courses. He wrote a series called The Apprentice Witch, a kind of cosy fantasy for middle grade. That's quite a nice place to have these gifts. Yes. It's not too dangerous. You're not going to be, you know, come to a sticky end in the way of the bone season.
[48:52] Yeah, I imagine cosy fantasy. It's not something I read a lot of, but I imagine there is a wealth of nice places to to have magic within that genre i somehow i'm not surprised to hear that thank you thank you so much uh samantha and we look forward to um the fifth installment in due course uh but in the meantime do look up the wonderful 10th anniversary edition if you read the bone season a while ago it's well worth going back to now because you'll get as we've just heard so much more from it and a sort of finely polished version um after the 10 years on edit job that was done so thank you very much for joining us thank you for having me.
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