Space Opera and Fantasy from Down Under

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 the director at the Centre and also an author. And today we are joined from somebody from all the other way around on the other side of the world, Michelle Diner, who is sitting in Perth in Australia. And I first came across Michelle's books through the audio versions of her dark class series, which is a sci-fi series. But as you'll soon hear, Michelle writes many different genres. So Michelle, welcome. Perhaps as some people listen to this, I don't know your work. Would you like to tell us a little bit about your journey to being a writer? Because you don't just do fantasy, do you? No, I started out as a historical fiction writer. My first publishing contract was with Simon Shuster's gallery books. And I wrote a three-book series for them, set around the quarter of Henry VIII. I think at the time Simon and Shuster was owned by CBS, and they had the tutors of that television series. And so they were very keen on buying books that were set in the Tudor era. And yeah, so, and then I wrote a Regency Set series for them. But in between those historical books, I ended up writing quite a lot of fantasy just because it was a really great break for me. I found the historicals very self-evidently very research heavy. And I'm quite a perfectionist. I was quite stressed by getting every little detail right. And fantasy was a really great escape for me, kind of a pressure valve. And yeah, so that's why I started writing more fancy. And then I had the idea for the first book in my Class V series, Dark Horse. And I kind of never looked back. I haven't written any historicals then. So I've got the series title wrong. So it's not Dark Class, it's Class V. Yes, and there are five of them now. Yes, which is wonderful news for readers. Just cycling back to what you said about writing historical. I've written historical fiction under, well, under various pen names, but particularly as writing for Eve Edwards, I did a Tudor series with Penguin. And I remember feeling that same pressure that you talked about. So the way I cope with it was focusing down on a year. And sort of saying, right, I'm going to understand this year, be it 1580 or whatever it was. And it was even worse when I wrote about the second world, the first world war, because there is so much information available. And I was writing about the trenches. So I did there is I thought, right, I'm going to find an account from somebody in that in the trenches. I'm going to see the day that I'm talking about from their point of view. So I found diary and thought, right, I'm just going to know it from that perspective, because there was so much, you're right, you just get overwhelmed. So did you do that? So I mean, narrowing down thing. Yes, I did. Well, with my tutor set books, the heroine is who's then her in boat, who was a real person. So there wasn't a lot written about her. But I did know around about when she was when she arrived in London, who she married, what she did while she was there, she was an artist in Henry Henry the eighth court. And one of the few women artists that was kind of recognized at that level. So that helps. And in my Regency series, I chose a specific historical event event. Sorry, I keep hearing myself. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that helps as well to choose, as you say, a specific year or a specific event. But in my tutor stuff, I mean, I found myself looking up the tide tables for the teams and working out what day was high tide for the day in my story. And the color of the mud in the fields and things like that. And I realize I have a problem with just getting things super cool. I don't know. I think those sort of details really help. I mean, we might talk about this a bit later on, but having a sense of a real time, real place really helps carry over into fantasy. And one of the things I learned recently, which I really enjoyed was finding out about how Tolkien, because he was during the Second World War a firewalls and which meant going up on the roofs of buildings to watch in case fire has broken out in any of the historic buildings due to bombing. He tracked the moon cycle, the moon phases. And he used what he was seeing for a lot of the rings and the journey nodding the rings through his own actual observations. And I think that kind of thing, if people are writing fantasy, really helps give a sense of so that you don't have a full moon one day and a crescent moon the next. Exactly. Because when people will stop having any faith in your world, unless you've got a very fast moon cycle for whatever reason in your, you know, want a different planet. I mean, that would be possible. Fantastic. So, it's helping with your plot, I think, because in the second book in my chewed a series, I wrote about the boat, the boats that kind of rode through the arches of London Bridge and high tide. And those kind of things really add to the story and it actually ended up being part of the crescendo at the end. And maybe I would not have known that much about it had I not gone into all the tide related information. And just so people, people know it's not the current London Bridge, it's the one with all the houses on. I wrote a book set, people looking on the bridge. So I also did that, and it was really dangerous because they had very narrow apertures. And so the terms is quite as strong tide. So it was like shooting a kind of rapids not helped by the fact that it was actually cool. So exciting. I must look at that book out, but I don't just read fantasy. I do now myself to read historical, so I look forward to reading that too. So Michelle, what do you think are your major influences in terms of fantasy on your way to being a writer? Can you think of any particular book series or films that have influenced how you come to write your fantasy? On my fantasy side, even though I don't write humorous fantasy at all, Terry Pratchett was really a big influence because the way he wrote fantasy was very different to what I was used to reading before. It was a lot more personal, and it was a lot more, almost, it had a contemporary feel to it, but it was set in a fantasy world. And I liked that kind of more immediate feel to it. Like I was reading a fast-paced contemporary book, but with all the great fantasy world-building that I loved as well, and the magic and obviously his humor was amazing, but I also found the same with E&M Banks. I think what both he and Terry Pratchett had that really appealed to me was the way that they portrayed women as well. A lot of the fantasy greats, I suppose, were men who wrote women in a way that I didn't feel included in when I was reading it, and they were the exceptions. And yeah, they had a way of connecting the characters and the plot in a way that really appealed to me. And I try and write fantasy that way, not a lot of descriptive world-building. I try and bring the world-building in through the observations of the of the characters themselves. So that's E&M Banks. Is that things like the was factory and those kind of things? That was his contemporary stuff, so that's what he wrote as E&M Banks. Right science fiction is he used the name E&M Banks. So he wrote a number of science fiction books, I don't know, about 15 to 20. You have one that you acquired a lot of them? Yes. Well, all of them are great, but my favourite is the use of weapons. Okay, right, I'm adding that to my reading list, immediately. So let's think about your overview of your various series. So I've noticed, I've only started reading you since the beginning of the year, so I've got a lot of reading to catch up on. But so we start with the class five series. I've seen it described as a space opera, so people immediately think Star Wars, don't they? But it's not Star Wars in that one of the cultures in it is our humanity, as opposed to being set in a galaxy far, far away with no contact to humanity. So would you like to sort of just give a little, what's the word, elevated pitch, I suppose they call it about that series? What's going on in that? Yeah, that series is really an alien abduction series, but it's not someone who gets abducted and then gets returned to earth. They were abducted and there's no way back. And they find them, the first book was written where I conceived of this character, Rose, who was abducted, but she wasn't the only prisoner. She eventually just realises that the ship itself that she's been captured by is also prisoners because he's an artificial intelligence. And the two of them form a collaboration to free themselves. And once they accomplish that, they discover, particularly Rose discovers, that she's in the middle of a whole lot of other cultures that have a deep-seated fear of artificial intelligence. And she is now freed this artificial intelligence. And he is now the most powerful being in the well, you know, the galaxy that she's found herself in. And how she negotiates that, and it was a lot of fun to write. Well, we'll be coming back to that series in a minute, but there's also, of course, the wave rider series that you... Yes, the burden string. Yes. Yeah. So what's going on in that series? That is more... As far as I suppose, that is... This is for your writers. This was my world-building solution because I wrote the Class V series, and obviously I had a whole world that I created with technology and culture and everything that comes with that. And then I wrote another series called The Sky Raid is series, which is actually closer to Star Wars than anything else. And I had culture and technology for that. And then I had some other stories to tell. And I thought about it and I went, this has got to be the last time I create an entirely new technology. There is only so much technology I can come up with that's completely different to all the other ones that I've done. And so I created this series called The Verden String where I could easily fit the stories that I had into an existing world. They don't... They aren't consecutive. People can read them in any order. Although they actually is an arc, a story arc, but you don't have to start at the beginning. You can come in at any point, but I don't have to reinvent the wheel for every single one of them. So that was my solution. If people wish to trace all these different series, we will be putting a link to Michelle's website in the show notes. So please look at that and then you can explore and pick your book where you start. So going back to the class five series, the first thing I wanted to ask you about is actually the humour because you mentioned that you were fond of Terry Pratchett and you don't write, they're not comedies in the same way as the Terry Pratchett are, but what you do have is a very strong sense of humour and for me where that resides in the class five series is around music. So just to explain to people who haven't read the series, what we've got here is a human woman who has been abducted, this is Rose. She comes to awareness or you know, she sort of wakes up in this alien spaceship and eventually is, I think it's not too much for a spoiler, is rescued by a nicer bunch of a different alien culture. But she finds that she's regarded as incredibly musically gifted because that particular species haven't got the vocal abilities to sing nicely. So she comes along, things happy birthday to somebody and they're absolutely astonished and amazed. And this joke is the jokes that keeps on giving because as you get more other characters coming along, some who are more musically talented than others, with different musical choices. And they react differently to being asked to sing, you know, some feel like they're the performing monkey and some feel, yeah, of course, and one's a music teacher, so yeah, she's in her comforts thing. I just enjoyed all that so much. So I suppose I have a question for you, which is, are you musical? I played the piano as a child, but I had one of those rarely terrible piano teachers that would smack, you know, hit your fingers if you weren't fast enough on the scales. And so I took my kids to music lessons and the way they were taught was so much better than the way I was taught. I started learning all over again, sitting at their lessons. My daughter and my son both have done musical the way to their final year. And my daughter is actually in a band and her single is played on the radio. And so yes, we are a musical family and I love music. And listening to my daughter, in particular, my daughter practiced a piano while I was writing the Class V series, influenced some of my musical choices in the book. There's some, yeah, there's some wonderful moments, like there's a moment where someone sings fly me to the moon, which is great. And there's also a Bohemian rhapsody, which starts off as a bit of a nose-nubbing moment where she's sort of thinking, well, I'm going to go for some pianist song. Which is great. But it is also through humour, what you're doing, of course, is thinking about the presence, the ubiquitous presence of music in our lives, which we take for granted. And imagining a place where that is something very hard to access is, for them, it's a very limited resource. So if you were abducted by the gree, who are the bad guys in this context? And we're only allowed up to an hour's music, which is what we've discovered is allowed to the last of your most recent books. She's got an hour's music recorded that she's allowed to listen to. What would be in your hour? Obviously, your daughter's tingle would be amongst that. Yes, definitely. That's pretty funny. What other tracks would you want to take to an alien culture? Well, I tend to over listen to things that I love. And then I end up not liking them as much. But I have never tired of walking on sunshine by Katrina and the waves. So that's definitely something that I would take along. Nina Simone's, my baby, just cares for me, which is in one of the books. And I think I would have to take some YouTube and some classical music. It's quite difficult. It's quite hard when you've only got an hour's music. That's right. I mean, you used to tend to last a bit longer. So you think, which one? You can't do like the Bach, Matthew, Passion or something because that's your hour gone. Maybe the night cracker by Shaikovsky. I think that it takes me back. Your book actually took me back to something that happened when I was at school, which is when I was in the high school equivalent, where occasionally, a teacher would be invited to give us sort of, this is something I love assembly. And my English teacher, who was my favorite teacher, of course, she said, she stood up and said, I'm going to play you a piece of music, which is my favorite piece of music. And it's the thing which sends tingles down my spine. And she played the Allegri Missouri, which is an incredible piece of choral music, famously written down. It was sort of hidden in the Vatican as their special piece of music. Moves up, listened to it once and came and wrote it down. And so got the secret out there. And it's not the kind of music I'd listened to before. And that moment of being transported from a Essex 9 o'clock in the morning, school assembly to this world of music, I think is a bit like how it might feel for an alien species hearing someone sing. So that's what I'm thinking of when I read your books. I think so. The idea of singing is very human. It's like story and singing is almost quintessentially human and trying to explain, as you say, the ubiquity of that to erase that doesn't hear it and highly prizes it is a running joke. And also a nod to human creativity, I think. Yeah, definitely. But let's talk about the subject of Art of Intelligence, which you have also explored in sort of a second main theme that is apparent in all the books. I don't want to give too much away because it is quite nice to find out, as you read, it's one of these plot developments, which is fun to find out. But there is a question of how far should AI be independent? And I know that for example, there are many scientists in our world have warned that it could get us sort of, you know, to the point of no return. Is it something that your personally worried about? I mean, Stephen Hawking said it was one of the big challenges of our century. Yeah, I think what concerns me is who writes the code that starts it off. Because from what I can gather on a lot of algorithms and facial recognition and things like that, and whatever code runs apps, things can go wrong if there isn't a wide array of people involved in the project. So you need voices from all different kinds of sectors of society involved in it, in my opinion. And I think that might be where the trouble will start. Whether or not it's going to become a huge problem, I guess time will tell. But I do think who we choose to write the kind of the or lay the groundwork will affect the outcome, obviously. Yeah, I think it's also there's a huge problem about data sets. I got very interested in this at one point. And I was reading as an excellent book by called the Creativity Code by Marcus DeSotoi, if you want to read about this in a technical sense. And so you've got an algorithm. But what happens now is that these algorithms teach themselves. And what they train themselves on are sets of data. So take, for example, facial recognition. If your data set, which is massive, is bias towards those who use an upload photograph. So let's say a Western world where it's predominantly white, you end up with a skewing towards male white as being the norm. That's because the data is not that someone's gone in and sort of said go and look for this. It's the data is this raw stuff, which the algorithm is using to teach itself. So people get this sort of strange bias coming in. And once the bias is there, it gets magnified. And so it has real world terrible outcomes. So for example, there is a move to make justice, you know, have a sort of automatic impartial algorithm deciding minor cases. But if your data is skewed to say that this percentage of young black males are likely to be guilty because that's what the data set tells you, it will skew the program. So you do, as you're saying, without the hand on the tiller of other voices saying, hang on a minute, my community is being represented or abused here. You can end up with terrible, terrible outcomes. I'm unjust unfair. And of course the same is true for its bias male against female and different age groups. I mean, there's all sorts of things that can go wrong in this. But there is also the question of the right of artificial intelligence itself if it gets to the point where it's aware and what that how you would imagine how you measure self-awareness. I mean, Star Trek has done this a lot over there with characters like data, but you're also looking at that issue. Do you think that's what for you would be self-awareness? What's your twist? When I... Yeah, it's extremely tricky. And when I wrote the Class Five series, I made the AI characters quite young, just exploring their world, but fully sentient already. And then towards the end of the series, I introduced some more evolving drawings who are slowly becoming sentient. And that was an interesting line that I was playing with and I actually don't know the answer other than to say it's a slow process of many small steps that they finally almost become their own personalities. And at that point, I think you can say they're self-aware, they understand what's going on and they're making their own choices. But it is incredibly difficult. I think you're very clear in the books that it's how you treat the AI, you get the answer back. So if you model mercy and humanity in the best sense, you get that back. Whereas if you fearful and try and trap it and try and shut it down, then you get aggression back, which is, you know, totally understandable, absolutely. I noticed that in the second book in the series, Dark Deeds, that you name the hero is called How? Was that a nod towards 2001, the space odyssey? No, no, that's the most difficult one. It's just so right. Mr. Mr. I will not open the door, answer, yeah. No, that was not intentionally done. Okay, anyway, I smiled when I saw that. So Michelle, just thinking more broadly now at all of your writing and thinking about people listening to this who are aspiring to be writers too, would you say that your process of writing is more character-led or plot-led or do you start with some sort of overarching idea? What's the very early stages of your creative process? It's usually personality-led, you know, character-led, but how I usually find most of my book starting with like a scenario, a person dealing with something specific. And so that's got a plot element in it already as the starting point. For example, Rose discovering that while she's a prisoner, she has an ally who's actually also a prisoner but has the ability to help her if she can help him. And it's that give and take that started the whole series for me, just just the idea of it. Oh, you you're alone, you're helpless, but actually you've got the brain and the most dangerous entity at your back. And that really fun juxtapodite ducks I Oh, sorry, I keep hearing myself. Jax, I can't say that, wouldn't it? Yeah. Jax, that position. Yeah. Of powerlessness and powerfulness together, which I enjoyed. And that's quite often what happens in my rising wave series as well. I had that same feeling, yeah. So do you have any tips on world building? You've said you've had to make three lots of worlds with technology. That's just the sci-fi. Not the fantasy. What I think is the best is whatever world you've decided to create, as you go about your normal day, think about yourself doing that same thing in the world that you've created. And that makes a much more solid world in your own mind. And then it's easier to write and get a sense of that place. Go to the shops and think, how would people buy food or clothes in this world that I've now created? Also, think about power. I think that's one of the most important things. Who has power? What do they do with that power? Who doesn't have power? What do they do to compensate for not having it? And a lot of things can lead from there just plot-wise. And just to make the world very believable. That's a really good tip. Thank you. Or two good tips there. Thank you. Also, we haven't touched on it that much, but there is a romance element in your stories. Just to say, when you say alien abduction, just to point out these aren't the alien abduction ones that you might find the sort of rippling muscle ones. It's not that kind of book. It's that's the scenario, not the, yeah. Anyway, so in terms of how you handle the romance. I see planet barbarians or anything like that. Yeah, yeah. Which are great reads if that's what you feel like, but we're doing something else in these particular series. So when you've got a romance and people know when they're reading this, OK, someone that she meets is going to be the romance. How do you think about this slow burn versus I've only got so many pages to get this and perhaps a limited time span because of your plot is compressing things? How do you handle that? Is it something that you think about in advance or is it something that you do in a second edit? How do you pace it? It isn't something I think about in advance, but it does worry me the whole way through. I, in some of my books, it happens because of the plot, the relationship starts sooner. And in some, it's only by the middle of the book that the romance kind of starts happening. And I'm just led by logic and timeframes and what actually makes sense. So I don't try and force anything. And I'm just quite careful with how I deal with it. So in some cases, people are automatically attracted to each other. And in others, the love interest will start out being quite weary of the heroine, for example. And slowly that turns into something more. And yeah, I particularly enjoyed Fiona and Hal because what I like in that particular one is how the people around Hal really distrusted her. And that happens again in that element of you, not everybody just accepts this person as being the thing of what's their agenda. And I like that because it puts a bit of grit in the oyster to make it feel as though she's not sort of hearts and flowers. It's actually pushing against a cultural norms, which say this shouldn't work. Yeah, particularly because there's a, in the book before, Rosa's brought along all of this trouble with this early other own making. So in the subsequent books, the other heroines have to wear that conflict. So yeah, as with the romance, I try and I'm trying to be mindful of the circumstance each heroine is in. And what would be logical for people to assume about them? So would you say that you mentioned that you turned to writing fantasy after having the sort of rigors of historical research? Would you say that the actual writing process though feels different when you're writing historical or fantasy or sci-fi? Or is it just you've gone through that door today? That's what's happening. I think they're quite similar world building techniques in each of them. I almost consider historical fiction speculist a fiction because we are imagining to a large degree how things were, particularly if you go back to the Tudor era or something. So as far as that goes, I think you have to bring the same skills, world building skills to historicals. And a lot of fantasy is generally kind of medieval in its background setting. So yeah, I think they're very similar. Yeah, I agree. And I think that so for example, if you put in your fantasy world, I did a fantasy world where someone was looked after birds of prey. That was his job, sort of scamming the vermin down. And so you can go to a bird of prey center and find out how the medieval people did this when it was part of society. And again, it's historical research that it feeds into a fantasy world. It's great fun at that kind of research. Yes. So to end our podcast, we always say wherein all the fantasy world is the best place for something. And I was saying to you before we started this, that I'd already done where's the best place to be a singer. And I'd pick your world. Because I thought, you know, anybody of a modicum of talent would come out really well in your world. So I can't even a modicum. Yeah, just being happy birthday, you're right, you're in there. So I thought that because the other big theme is artificial intelligence, my question for you is where in all the fantasy worlds that you've read or watched on the big screen, would you think it'd be a good place to be a sentient droid? So I think the Star Wars universe, there is a really good place for a sentient droid there. I don't think it's a good place. Yeah, I think Blade Runner universe wouldn't be good. No, no. Exactly the opposite of Star Wars. Yeah, it was originally based on the novella duanjoy's dream of electric sheep. That one. That's right. Which, I think, is much, much funnier. I don't know if people have ever read the novel and compared it to the film. It's like two completely different takes. And it's less bad, I think, in the funny version. That's still not great. Yeah, no, I agree. I think Star Wars wins that one. Those just to be a bit different, I might actually pick Star Trek because you get to actually be a member of the crew, don't you, if you're... That's true. Thank you. So... Oh, and a helper. Yeah, yeah. So I think I'll pick Star Trek, you pick Star Wars and hopefully will please both fandoms by our choices, though. So Michelle, thank you so much for being a guest on MythMakers. And I hope that this means that many more people will look out for your books and enjoy the many series that you've written. So thank you very much. Well, thanks very much for having me. Goodbye. Goodbye. It's worldwide.