Laura Hubbard

The dreaded sophomore novel is always a telling test for a new writer. And the most difficult incarnation of it may be the second novel in a super-hyped, highly acclaimed fantasy series. S.A. Chakraborty’s The City of Brass was a superb introduction to both the author and her intricately detailed, vividly realistic world inspired by Middle Eastern legends and fairy tales.

The Kingdom of Copper begins five years later, with former Cairo grifter Nahri ensconced in the dangerous court of Daevabad, her once-friend Prince Ali on the run from his father and an unknown new threat growing stronger on the horizon. An emotionally devastating, character-driven novel that also succeeds in building out its complex world, The Kingdom of Copper is further proof that the Daevabad trilogy is on its way to becoming a modern fantasy classic. We talked to Chakraborty about the mythology that inspired her novels, why she added a new point-of-view character and more.

How was writing your second book in this series different from writing the first?
I was writing to a deadline! My first book began as this personal, private project that meandered all over the place and took nearly a decade to write—the second book I turned around in eighteen months. And while I was grateful for the opportunity to dive back into the world, it was very difficult to adjust to the crunch.

Some of the conflicts in this book are over questions of historical accuracy (what happened) and of historical interpretation (how we should feel about it). How did your passion for history influence how you deal with these sorts of questions?
It’s the constant reading of different sources. I very much believe history is written by the victors—we can look even today how different media outlets frame current events. And I wanted the characters and the world to reflect that. They’re deeply attached to their version of the past—it’s their truth, what shapes their politics and everyday lives, and yet so much of it rests on a very shaky foundation. I feel like every day I read a new interpretation of some historical fact I’ve always taken for granted, and I wanted the background of the world to seem just as volatile.

In The City of Brass and The Kingdom of Copper, Nahri is forced to deal with living under two separate occupations, first in Cairo and then in Daevabad. Why did you choose to contrast those particular regimes?
There is a bit of a spoiler for the third book in this answer that I’d like to avoid, and I don’t think we see enough of Cairo in the first book (it takes place in the earliest weeks of Napoleon’s invasion), to be able to offer a contrast just yet. That being said, I wanted it to feel like a bit of a portal fantasy that stepped back in time. Nahri’s Egypt is entering the modern era whereas the magical world is a few centuries behind humans—more so than usual because they’ve started to turn inward.

One of the things that feels different about this book is the choice to set it five years after The City of Brass concludes. So often trilogies tend to stack one book after the other with very little breathing room between. What led to the decision to give your characters that much space?
I always knew I wanted to give the characters that kind of breathing room. Nahri and Ali are fairly young in the first book when their worlds are turned upside down and they’re thrust into very different hostile environments. To me, it was a bit more interesting to pick up later—when they’ve learned to adapt and survive and train in their respective specialties (it was also important to me to show that Nahri’s medical training would take years)—and show their growth through even worse challenges.

The City of Brass is told from Nahri and Ali’s points of view. Why did you add in Dara’s perspective in The Kingdom of Copper?
The book deals with the consequences of choice. Injustice and oppression are not the sole responsibility of tyrants—they require a lot of regular people to either tacitly endorse such systems or turn a blind eye. With Dara, I wanted to introduce a character I knew people would come to love, who would be rightfully understood as a hero, as a love interest, as a fundamentally good man—and then show how someone like that can commit great evil, without ever justifying it to the readers. For the second book, it felt more effective—though heartbreaking—to accomplish this from his perspective.

I love the tribal and regional nature of magic within this series. Did the distinctions of which tribes do which kinds of magic come out of your research, or was it more of a narrative choice?
Both. In the history of the book’s world, the djinn are separated into six tribes by the Prophet Suleiman, stripped of much of their magic and cast off into the human world. They survive in many ways by quietly grubbing off the local humans they’ll later look down upon and adding what remains of their magic to human technology. So djinn who awoke in wealthy trade cities on the coast end up taking local ships and enchanting them to fly, becoming premier traders in their world.

If Ali didn’t have to deal with palace intrigue and the threat of assassination, what do you think he’d prefer to be doing with his time?
I think under different circumstances, Ali could have found happiness in the djinn village of Bir Nabat. He’s the consummate do-gooder and here he was able to help people in a far more straightforward, tangible manner—dig a well, start a school. I could see Ali making a quiet life, starting a family to replace the one he lost in Daevabad and being generally content. Unfortunately for him, his author had other ideas.

One of the things I love about this book is that the city of Daevabad is as complex a character as any in the series. How did you go about crafting a setting as complicated as Daevabad?
Haha, I worked on it for a decade! But honestly, I just tried to make it realistic, as vague as that sounds. It’s a messy, chaotic place born of centuries of occupation and forced migration—but it’s also a thriving metropolis where tens of thousands of people are just trying to get by. Magic or not, you’re going to need some order in the marketplaces, a service to pick up the trash and places where regular people socialize.

You can really feel the depth of research behind The Daevabad Trilogy as you’re reading it. Often it feels like there are stories lurking around every corner that we just aren’t privy to as readers. Can you talk about a historical story you found in your research that you loved but that just didn’t fit with the trilogy?
This is fairly silly, but I’m a big fan of the old regional folktales such as 1001 Nights and Tales of the Marvelous and News of the Strange, and one trope I’ve yet to find a place for are its murderous automatons. Sometimes they’re ancient sculptures that come to life with magic, other times they’re the metal creations of brilliant scientists—an early form of steampunk. Either way, if a character comes across an eerie armed statue in one of these stories, someone is definitely about to be murdered. I haven’t been able to work one in yet but I’m still hoping!

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Kingdom of Copper.

The pitch for R.J. Barker’s The Bone Ships is simple—fantasy pirates, sailing on ships made out of dragon’s bones. But there’s a lot more going on under the surface (sorry). We talked to Barker about the inspirations for his seafaring world, questionable taxidermy and why the matriarchal society of The Hundred Isles isn’t exactly a utopia.

At times The Bone Ships reminded me of a grown-up, fantastical Treasure Island or one of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series. Where did you draw inspiration for The Bone Ships?
Treasure Island is definitely a really early influence, so is C.S. Forester with the Hornblower books. Then later on I drifted away, got distracted by other things, as I do, and Robin Hobb’s Liveship traders put me back on the path to the sea (so it was a huge thrill when Robin described The Bone Ships as “brilliant”). From there I discovered Patrick O’Brian and I fell in love with the world of Captain Aubrey and Dr. Maturin. I’ve also always loved the sea. It’s something I can watch for hours and never get bored, the constant shifting of it, the sheer size, the way it dwarfs us. We think we are the masters of the planet but every so often the sea rises up and shows us we are no such thing.

Where did you get the idea for ships made of dragons’ bones?
I’m kind of known for, maybe, being a bit odd, but I always think the way I get to these things is really logical. I wanted to write about ships but in a fantasy world, so I thought about what I could take away from our world that would make me go about it slightly differently. The first thing that sprung to mind was trees. Then you need a different material to build from, and bone was often used for tools by neolithic societies and it was also popular among sailors for doing scrimshaw (bone carving). So bone made sense in that way but, obviously, if you’re going to build a ship they have to be big bones, so from there you get to dragons—though I think if you were a dragon pedant, you might take issue with me describing the arakeesians as dragons. I tend to think of them as more akin to kaiju but dragons is an easy shorthand.

Will we get to see more of the Gaunt Islanders? I feel like we got a small window into how different their society is from that of the Hundred Isles, but they still seem like such a mystery.
Yes! But not immediately. I’m writing book three now and large parts of that will take place within the Gaunt Islands, so we’ll get to see their society and I’m really looking forward to writing that. One of my problems as a writer is I get bored really quickly and taking things to a new place is an easy way of refreshing things and rediscoveirng my excitement. So we’ll definitely get to see the Gaunt Islanders because it allows me to invent more things, and I like to invent things.

Other than for control of ships, why is the war even being fought? Will we ever know? (And do the countries even really remember?)
I’ve no great plans to explain the beginnings of the war because I don’t think it’s needed for the story the books are telling. When I write, I tend to keep it quite close to the character’s point of view—so we can only ever really know what they know and, as you said, they don’t know. It’s just what they do. I always hope when people read what I do they don’t go away thinking that violence is cool. The violence in the Scattered Archipelago* is essentially pointless, it’s a waste of life. As is the story in the book in many ways, they’re sent out to hunt this magnificent creature, and for what? So people can go on killing each other for reasons they don’t even understand. Part of Joron’s growth through the book is that he begins to see his society in a different way and understand that maybe, very fundamentally, something is wrong.

*That is the first time I have EVER spelled “archipelago” right the first time. Go me.

One of the most interesting (and maybe most disturbing) parts of Hundred Isles culture is the interplay between childbirth, religion and political and naval power. Why did you choose to center the power structures of this society around birth?
I don’t know where the first thought came from. But often, historically, our societies have hidden women away because the ability to have children is precious and hugely important. And of course there’s the wish for men to ensure that a child is theirs, that their genetic line is continuing. But the flipside of anything being valuable is it gives you power, and in this world to have healthy children is very rare, and it's definitely more important than continuing someone’s genetic line. And since that line is matriarchal it doesn’t really matter who the father is (it’s never said but definitely implied that women have multiple lovers), so it seemed like a steady base to set a society up on. Then once you have that reasoning set up, everything comes after—their religion paints men as flawed and gives them reasons for men to never be in control. So women are put in positions of power, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

One of the reasons for flipping a society is to make people look at ours again. Putting women in charge doesn’t magically make everything great in the Hundred Isles, because women aren’t some bizarre other species. People are people. You set up these things and go “look, everything is different,” and then you use that to show that our fundamental flaws, the things that cause the darkness in our world, are the same. Greed, pride, the lust for power. The Hundred Isles are a terrible place, but it’s normal for the people that live in it, and it’s only when they are forced to look at it, and to some degree be outside it, that they begin to want change.

The more I think about the Gullaime, the more questions I have. How did they end up enslaved? Are there any out there who aren’t? And what exactly is a Windspire, really?
Aha! So many questions I cannot answer without ruining the next two books. . . I think (hope) people will be as interested in the Gullaime as you are, and we will definitely find out a lot more about them and their society. The Gullaime (who three books down the line, I am kind of wishing I had given a name to) has an ever growing part to play. I love writing him/it, there’s something very mischievous and yet innocent about the Gullaime. And his/its relationship with Joron is probably one of my favourite things.

The world of The Bone Ships feels both enormous because of the sheer volume of islands, and hemmed in because of the great storms raging at the edge of the map. Why did you choose to have the storms there as a sort of “edge of the world”? And have they always been there?
They have always been there, because it was one of the first things I thought of when this idea was playing about inside my head. A lot of things fell by the wayside but the storms stayed. I just really like that idea. In a lot of old maps you have this thing where for the people drawing them, or looking at them, the world just ends because they don’t know what exists past the edges of their map. I really liked that idea of creating a world that actually does have hard and impassable borders, and I didn’t want walls or mountains. Storms seemed fitting for these people and this place. As far as the people of the Scattered Archipelago know they have always been there, yes. But, as I said, we only know what they know. . .

In your bio, you mention a collection of “questionable taxidermy.” Where did that come from? And is there a difference between proper and questionable taxidermy?
When my wife and I got married, we bought ourselves this fox head we’d seen in a shop. It had been there for years and years, and it had just been there moldering away because it didn’t look very good, and we felt kind of sorry for it. We really like things that maybe other people wouldn’t love. There’s a fashion for ‘bad’ taxidermy at the moment but we’re not really part of that. I can’t really explain what it is we like about a thing, just that we have no interest in some lovingly stuffed hunting trophy. We like the things that maybe wouldn’t find a home anywhere else. They’re not quite right, but someone meant well, and we love these things for it. They have to be old too. Rather than collecting odd taxidermy, I like to think of us as more of a home for retired taxidermy. Taxidermy that’s got a bit eccentric in its dotage.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Bone Ships.

Author photo by SMB Photography.

Genevieve Gornichec’s debut novel, The Witch’s Heart, was one month in the writing but 10 years in the making.

In the fall of 2011, she needed to write a term paper for a college class on Norse mythology. Her professor said the paper could be about anything . . . except Loki. Luckily, the professor had said something else that drew Gornichec’s attention, about the relationship between female figures in Norse mythology and the concept of fate and death. The comment led her to Loki’s mate, Angrboda, a witch-mother with the gift of prophecy.

Gornichec ended up writing a paper that connected Angrboda to other female figures in the mythology—eventually. “Before that,” the author says from her home in Ohio, “I wrote The Witch’s Heart in three weeks for NaNoWriMo [National Novel Writing Month] in the wee hours of the morning while I should have been working on that paper.”

“In many ways, Loki is the least interesting person in the novel.”

In The Witch’s Heart, Angrboda is trying to build a new identity for herself at the edge of existence after being thrice burned for refusing to give Odin the secrets of the future he desires. But then Loki comes along. Despite her initial mistrust of the trickster god, Angrboda falls in love. The witch raises their three improbable children—the goddess Hel, the Midgard Serpent Jörmungandr and the wolf Fenrir—in her cave in the forest. At first she is safely hidden from Odin and the burden of knowing what fate has in store for her children, but her sheltered life won’t last. She of all people knows that she can’t hide forever. Ragnarök (the apocalyptic end of the world in Norse mythology) is coming, and everyone must play their part.

Like John Gardner’s Grendel or Madeline Miller’s Circe, The Witch’s Heart shifts the focus of a well-known myth to a secondary character with stunning and heartbreaking results. The novel actually started as a “love letter, to Loki, really,” but by the end, Gornichec realized that she’d “really made him suck” and that the story was more of a love letter to “Angrboda . . . and all the other characters.” In many ways, Loki is the least interesting person in the novel. He’s certainly far less interesting than Angrboda, the woman who can see Ragnarök coming but knows she can do nothing to stop it.

After graduating from Ohio State University, Gornichec became involved in Viking Age Living History, a community that re-creates the customs, fighting styles and arts and crafts of Viking life. Her experience with the group helped to root her book in historical reality. Originally, she described Angrboda as wearing heavy, ornate brooches and beads, inspired by the jewelry that archaeologists have found at Viking burial sites. But after struggling to do daily chores around camp in similar clothes, Gornichec knew she needed to simplify the witch’s clothing. Away went the brooches and beads, replaced by a more sensible ensemble.

Gornichec’s command of detail in The Witch’s Heart is immense, pulling readers in and making them examine not just Angrboda’s deepest, most unsettling worries but also the tiniest, most mundane moments of her life. Indeed, some of the most beautiful scenes in the book are the smallest—Loki snoring in bed or Angrboda’s efforts to make her cave more suitable for habitation with help from her huntress friend, Skadi. The grand background of foundational epics such as “Beowulf” is still there, but Gornichec grounds the story in its practicalities.

Because the Norse pantheon can only end with Ragnarök, Gornichec always assumed that she knew exactly how The Witch’s Heart would end. Her editor, Jessica Wade, didn’t quite agree. “She said, ‘I know what you’re trying to do here, and I think that you could craft an ending that’s more satisfying to your readers . . . without compromising the source material.’ ” Gornichec says that her editor’s intervention “single-­handedly saved everyone” from the original ending by encouraging her to build something that is instead more “bittersweet” and “satisfying.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE:
Read our starred review of The Witch's Heart. And if you love audiobooks, check out our review of the audiobook, read by Jayne Entwistle.

Gornichec hopes that readers will walk away from her book wanting to know more, ready to ask and find answers to questions about the more mysterious figures of Norse mythology. “A couple people have asked me if I’m ever going to do a Sigyn companion novel of some sort or if I’m ever going to write her side of the story,” she says, referring to Loki’s Asgardian wife. “And my answer to that is no.” She encourages fans to write that story themselves, to “explore on their own and find their own conclusions.” Because, as she notes, what is The Witch’s Heart but “an alternate universe mythology fan fiction, really?”

Author photo by Daina Faulhaber