Shelley Parker-Chan, author of She Who Became the Sun

Goodreads: Summarize your new book in a couple of sentences.

Shelley Parker-Chan: She Who Became the Sun is a queer reimagining of the rise of Zhu Yuanzhang, the 14th-century monk turned rebel who expelled the Mongol conquerors of China and became the founding emperor of the Ming dynasty. It’s a book version of one of those sweeping, addictive Asian historical TV dramas!

GR: What sparked the idea for this book?

SPC: I’ve always been interested in the idea of monks—people who set aside worldly interests in favor of dedication to worship. But I love the idea of a bad monk: someone who can’t—or doesn’t want to—overcome their ambition, their desire, their attachment to the world. When I came across the Hongwu Emperor’s backstory, I realized he was my bad monk. But I also wanted to twist the story of this man whose ambition and capacity for violence enabled him to become the ultimate patriarch. What if I made him not a man? How would that change the meaning of his ambition, and rise, and rule?

GR: What was the most challenging part of writing this book?

SPC: Nailing Zhu’s character was definitely the hardest part. How can someone who is born the lowest of the low—told over and over by the world and everyone in it that she’s worthless—possibly conceive of becoming the emperor? On the face of it, it seems absurd. There’s something fundamentally mysterious about the origins of world-conquering ambition in ordinary people. Perhaps that’s why we like to reach into the mythic register for explanations: that these people are touched by god—or fate.

GR: Who are some of your all-time-favorite speculative fiction writers?

SPC: All hail the genius of Ted Chiang! Naomi Novik writes a banging story, and I’ll read anything she writes. Same with C.S. Pacat. Older favorites are Ursula K. Le Guin, Tamora Pierce, and Diana Wynne Jones. Indie horror-romance author R. Lee Smith goes hard where few others dare to tread. I also recently discovered Octavia E. Butler via Bloodchild, and: wow.

GR: What are some new fantasy books you've been enjoying and recommending to friends? 

SPC: Ava Reid’s The Wolf and the Woodsman is dark and hot and a devastatingly smart exploration of ethnic nationalism. Tasha Suri’s The Jasmine Throne is tender and ferocious by turns as it takes on the patriarchy. I loved Lee Mandelo’s creepy, visceral exploration of loss and Southern masculinity in Summer Sons. And Nghi Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful is Gatsby revisited and queered and perfected.

GR: For someone who hasn't read speculative fiction in a while, what's a good book to lure them back to the genre? 

SPC: Books with speculative elements are tucked away in every literary genre, so lots of people are probably reading SFF without thinking it’s what they’re reading. Books like Madeline Miller’s Circe, Natasha Pulley’s The Bedlam Stacks, Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, Naomi Alderman’s The Power, Tana French’s The Likeness, Claire North’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander—aren’t they all fantasy, really? Start with those, and realize there’s more to SFF than spaceships and secondary world epic fantasies. Then take a look at the SFF shelves, and realize that there always has been.

GR: What's one fantasy world, object, or invention that you wish were real?

SPC: As someone who has spent a lot of time traveling for work on deeply uncomfortable buses, boats, motorcycles, long-distance trains, and frankly unairworthy airplanes—please give me a teleporter. Please.
 

Nghi Vo, author of The Chosen and the Beautiful

Goodreads: Summarize your new book in a couple of sentences.

Nghi Vo: The Chosen and the Beautiful offers a new take on The Great Gatsby from the view of minor character Jordan Baker, if Jordan were queer, magical, and Vietnamese American. It's the Roaring Twenties again, everyone's sold their soul, and there's magic running through the power lines.

GR: What sparked the idea for this book?

NV: The Chosen and the Beautiful came about due to about 20 years of thinking about the blank places in The Great Gatsby, a talk with my agent, and the image of paper flowers being thrown up into the air and coming down as real ones.

GR: What was the most challenging part of writing this book?

NV:  Some of the research was difficult to get through. White women had only had the vote for two years when the novel starts, nonwhite women wouldn't get it for decades. The twilight sleep that Daisy goes through was a horror, and the United States was dealing with massive waves of anti-immigrant sentiment that I suspect have never really gone away, only gone underground. For all its glitz and glamour, the Roaring Twenties has some real evil lurking in the wings.

GR: Who are some of your all-time-favorite speculative fiction writers?

NV: Ooh, Sarah Monette/Katherine Addison, Aliette de Bodard, Cassandra Khaw, Angela Carter, Zen Cho, T. Kingfisher, and José Luis Zárate, for sure!

GR: What are some new mysteries you've been enjoying and recommending to friends? 

NV: Black Water Sister, by Zen Cho
Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders: A Dominion of the Fallen Story, by Aliette de Bodard
Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke
The Incryptid series, by Seanan McGuire

GR: For someone who hasn't read speculative fiction in a while, what's a good book to lure them back to the genre? 

NV: Likely T. Kingfisher's A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking. Kingfisher's a beyond-worthy successor to Terry Pratchett's brand of humor that cuts, and there's a sentient sourdough starter—how can you go wrong?
 
    

Matt Bell, author of Appleseed

Goodreads: Summarize your new book in a couple of sentences.

Matt Bell: Appleseed is an epic speculative environmental novel spanning a thousand years of past, present, and future. It begins in 1799, with a mythological retelling of the Johnny Appleseed folktale; it continues with a scientist turned rewilder in a near-future late-climate-change America, whose resistance group is trying to stop a megacorporation from unilaterally geoengineering the stratosphere; and concludes 700 years later with the story of a bioengineered clone stranded atop a giant glacier, who, after centuries alone, discovers a single new life.
 
Across the three story lines, Appleseed explores climate change, manifest destiny and extractive capitalism, settler colonialism and climate refugees, futuristic iterations of geoengineering and bioengineering (including nanobees and supertrees), depleted national parks, ecoterrorism and rewilding, a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, shape-shifting fauns and witches, a sci-fi heist and the crossing of a vast glacier, extinct trees growing out of 3-D–printed creatures, the abandoned nuclear repository under Yucca Mountain in Nevada, and then maybe a couple of other really weird things.

GR: What sparked the idea for this book?

MB: The novel was sparked by a line in Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire, where Pollan relates the story of Johnny Appleseed while explaining the domestication of the apple. Pollan calls the folk hero an "American Dionysus"—and as soon as I heard that, I thought: Wouldn't it be fun to recast Johnny Appleseed as a literal Dionysian figure, an even more wild character than the one from the folktale I grew up with? Pretty soon I'd written the novel's first sentence, all the while imagining a furred hand stretching toward black dirt: Chapman plants an apple seed...

GR: What was the most challenging part of writing this book?

MB: Probably figuring out the near-future story line, both in its world-building and its plot. It turns out it's a lot easier to wildly invent a far future, where the big time gaps mean there's less need to detail how exactly we got there from our present. Figuring out what our world could be like in 50 years required a lot more detailed thinking about our present world and the way events might progress from here if certain choices were made. But that challenge is part of the fun!

GR: Who are some of your all-time-favorite speculative fiction writers?

MB: Ursula K. Le Guin is one of my favorite writers, and she was a huge influence on Appleseed. Other favorites include Ted Chiang, Iain M. Banks, Sofia Samatar, William Gibson, Octavia E. Butler, China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer, N.K. Jemisin, Ann Leckie, Nnedi Okorafor, Samuel Delany, Charles Yu, and Brian Evenson.

GR: What are some new sci-fi and fantasy books you've been enjoying and recommending to friends? 

MB: I've recently loved Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse, The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones, The Memory Theater by Karin Tidbeck, The Seep by Chana Porter, The Arrest by Jonathan Lethem, and The Deep by Rivers Solomon. I also just read an early copy of Sequoia Nagamatsu's How High We Go in the Dark, which I can't wait to recommend to people when it comes out in 2022. 

GR: For someone who hasn't read speculative fiction in a while, what's a good book to lure them back to the genre? 

MB: On the more fantastical side, I'd recommend N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season, and on the sci-fi end, Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice. Almost everyone I know has loved those two books, no matter what their usual reading preference.

GR: What's one sci-fi or fantasy world, object, or invention that you wish were real?

MB: There's little I like better than a good portal fantasy, and I've always dreamed of finding my own portal to elsewhere. Maybe it's an unlikely machine that lets its user travel at will through time and space. Maybe it's a wardrobe that opens up into one particular snowy woods, dumping you out near a famous lamppost. All I know is that if the opportunity ever arose for me to take such a leap, I'd be through the portal in an instant.
    

Tasha Suri, author of The Jasmine Throne

Goodreads: Summarize your new book in a couple of sentences.

Tasha Suri: In an Indian-inspired fantasy world, a captive, vengeful princess and a maidservant with secret magic work together to bring down the princess’s tyrannical emperor brother. Along the way, they fall in love and may even set an empire ablaze.

GR: What sparked the idea for this book?

TS: I wanted to write a story that contained everything I’d wanted from a fantasy novel but hadn’t been able to find: a setting drawing on ancient Indian history, Hindu epics, and mythology; a thorny sapphic love story between morally gray women; and a cast of complex women and men dealing with the impacts of imperialism in different, often fraught ways. My desire to bring all those elements together helped me begin crafting The Jasmine Throne.

GR: What was the most challenging part of writing this book?

TS: The number of characters and points of view. In the past I’ve written more intimate stories focusing on a small range of characters, so writing a novel with a larger scope and a big cast stretched my writing muscles. But I found I really enjoyed the challenge of delving into different characters’ heads and exploring a wider, more complex fantasy world.

GR: Who are some of your all-time-favorite speculative fiction writers?

TS: I have so many favorites, but certainly N.K. Jemisin, Jacqueline Carey, Martha Wells, Kate Elliott, and Aliette de Bodard are all writers I hugely admire.

GR: What are some new fantasy books you've been enjoying and recommending to friends?

TS: So many, but I’ve been particularly enjoying A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark, which is a murder mystery set in an alternative history Egypt, and The Wolf and the Woodsman by Ava Reid, a darkly folkloric Jewish fantasy. Both of them are electrifyingly good.

GR: For someone who hasn't read speculative fiction in a while, what's a good book to lure them back to the genre?

TS: I think it depends what they like to read that’s not speculative! But many people love a good, heartwarming story of found family and overcoming injustice, so I would probably recommend The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune. It’s gentle, warm, incisive, and empathetic. Deeply magical in the best way.

GR: What's one fantasy world, object, or invention that you wish were real?

TS: Mirrors that act as portals to other places. Or just portals. It would be very useful to be able to travel without needing to drive or catch a flight, and I’d accept a few wrong turns into other dimensions in return for that kind of convenience.
 
   

Becky Chambers, author of A Psalm for the Wild-Built

Goodreads: Summarize your new book in a couple of sentences.

Becky Chambers: A Psalm for the Wild-Built is a solarpunk science fantasy about a traveling monk and a nature-loving robot who go on a philosophical road trip together. Against the backdrop of a near-utopian world, they are seeking the answer to the question of what humans still need.

GR: What sparked the idea for this book?

BC: It’s a big hodgepodge of pet interests and inspirations thrown in a blender. The two big ideas that went into it were wanting to provide a counterpoint to the narrative that technology and nature are inherently opposed, and wanting to write a story that served as pure comfort for an adult audience.

GR: What was the most challenging part of writing this book?

BC:  Finding the entry point. Once I had my main characters on lock, everything else flowed easily, but it took a lot of different iterations of them before I landed on the right thing.

GR: Who are some of your all-time-favorite speculative fiction writers?

BC: Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, and Octavia E. Butler. Something of a holy trinity, I know.

GR: What are some new sci-fi books you've been enjoying and recommending to friends?  

BC:  I’m going to be brutally honest here: My past year and a half has been a gauntlet of deadlines, and the pandemic really ate up my mental bandwidth. The cost of writing a bunch of new books is that I haven’t had much opportunity to read others. My TBR is taller than me at this point, and I’ve only just started chipping away at it. I am very much behind the times.

GR: For someone who hasn't read speculative fiction in a while, what's a good book to lure them back to the genre? 

BC: I am cringing about how shameless this plug is about to be, but wanting to provide people with a nice, accessible entry point to science fiction is a huge part of why I do what I do! My standalone novella To Be Taught, If Fortunate would fit the bill here. It’s short, it’s not part of a bigger series, and it was very much written to be user-friendly for people who don’t read sci-fi or aren’t well-versed in STEM fields.

GR: What's one sci-fi world, object, or invention that you wish were real?

BC: Replicators. I hate cooking. I hate doing the dishes. I prefer to put as little thought and effort as possible into feeding myself, but I also like to eat healthy, so these two traits are in constant conflict. I also tend to lose track of mealtimes while I’m working, and I get very hangry, which is likewise a less-than-ideal pairing. If I could summon any dish I fancied at any time, I would have no other wants.