Interstellar Flight Magazine Best of Year One

by Holly Lyn Walrath

  INTERSTELLAR FLIGHT PRESS: Chilling Effect is really fast-paced, and I thought the action scenes were particularly original and well done. Do you have any kind of martial arts background yourself? Did you do any special research to make the fight scenes more visceral?

  VALERIE VALDES: My “special research” for fight scenes varied depending on what I was doing. I studied martial arts and stage combat a long time ago—shout-out to Chessmasters, ‘sup my Rennies—and I relied on that primarily for sensory details. Stage combat especially is very focused on selling reactions, which I think is one of the most important parts of writing a fight; it’s one thing to lovingly describe a punch being thrown, but if you don’t then describe how the punch lands, it loses impact—pun absolutely intended.

  I’m also a fan of kung fu, gun fu, and wuxia films, which tend to have the best fight choreography in the history of ever. They’re not only amazing on a technical level, they also nail the emotional trajectory and stakes for the primary characters involved, and they’re tonally appropriate to the situation. A fight scene in a comedy will be wacky and wild and fun, where a scene in a drama will be tense and brutal; compare, say, something from Police Story to Sha Po Lang, or Kung Fu Hustle to Ip Man. Seriously, go do it, everyone needs to watch more of these movies and then come fangirl about them with me.

  IFP: A large component of this book is Eva’s bond with her crew. How did you “assemble” her crew as you were writing? Was it a conscious process, “Oh, I need an engineer, a doctor, some muscle . . .” or did the characters emerge as you were writing? And, this might be mean, but do you have a favorite member of the crew? (Mine’s probably Vakar.)

  VV: Putting the crew together was a lot of fun. Mostly I thought about a combination of characters I loved from books, movies, video games, and TV shows, as well as my friends and family, and then mashed it all together. Considering logically what job roles would need to be filled on a small cargo ship was also part of the process; what kinds of skills could each person bring to the party, and how could they be showcased in the story? I also wanted there to be a good mix of backgrounds, ages and so on, and a variety of outside interests that not only gave readers a sense of each character, but also the wider universe of the novel and each person’s place in it.

  Once I started writing, some of the characters changed a bit from how I originally intended as their voices solidified in my mind—Min, for example, was initially much more formal and withdrawn, but after watching a few Korean soap operas I decided to make her more of a bubbly teenager. I also had a character who was part of the crew in the first draft, but who was way too badass and basically did all the cool stuff, leaving Eva sidelined in her own novel. I didn’t kill that particular darling, but I did change his role entirely and give Eva all his awesomesauce moves instead. If I had to pick a favorite, it’s probably Pink, because she’s incredibly easy and fun for me to write; she’s world-weary and snarky, but extremely caring, and I more or less just picture a hybrid of two of my friends and Laverne Cox and she writes herself.

  IFP: I’ll try not to spoil too much, but the romance in this is a bit unorthodox, as Eva’s love interest is not human. What made you want to give your main character Eva such a different love interest than the norm? Did writing an outside-the-box romance present any challenges for you?

  VV: Two words: Mass Effect. It’s definitely not the first or only series to tackle romance between a human and a member of a different species, but it got me thinking about the concept more deeply and made me want to try my hand at it. What points of overlap might one find in courtship rituals, on a personal and cultural basis? What physical aspects could inform attraction on both sides, or make relations more complicated? What kinds of miscommunications might occur? How is a baby formed? And of course, on the Monster F***er Kinsey Scale, where would this fall? There’s a big difference between, say, Aeryn Sun and Garrus Vakarian in terms of generally accepted concepts of attractiveness. Certainly, there had to be enough similarity between my characters for any connection to occur at all; that goes for any human relationship as well, but when you factor in an entirely separate evolutionary trajectory and its accompanying diversity of societies, things can get much more complicated if you let them.

  I also didn’t want this to function as a metaphor for any existing variety of marginalized human relationships, which is one path similar situations can take; the danger there is in dehumanizing or exoticizing those pairings and groupings and unintentionally implying that they’re intrinsically alien in nature. Eva is pansexual, not because she’s interested in someone from another species, but because she’s attracted to people of all genders, as many people are.

  IFP: Your bio mentions that you’re an active member of the NaNoWriMo community (National Novel Writing Month). How did you get into NaNoWriMo? Do you feel like the NaNo experience and/or community is an important part of your writing process?

  VV: I got into NaNoWriMo right at the tail end of college. I can’t remember how I heard about it, but it seemed like an incredible challenge to write 50,000 words in a single month. I’d pretty much stopped writing fiction entirely at that point, and had been focusing on poetry instead—I had written a book of poems for my senior thesis, a few of which eventually found homes in various publications. But I was also participating in a fairly brutal online poetry workshop that ultimately did more harm than good, I think, and my productivity and confidence were both battle-damaged. The NaNo community was, by contrast, intensely supportive and focused on quantity over quality, which was incredibly freeing once I managed to get out of my own head enough to embrace the ethos. I failed the first two years I tried it, including my first year as a Municipal Liaison for the Miami region, but then I got the hang of it and started routinely churning out new novels every year. Most of them were unfinished because 50,000 words is apparently not enough for my brand of story, but every time I “won” it was proof that I could do the thing, and I leveled up a lot by doing so much so quickly.

  Chilling Effect started as a short story, but I used NaNoWriMo to expand it into a novel, writing the first half in November 2014 and then finishing the rest over the course of the next nine months. I have three other novels I’m working on now, including the sequel and two completely separate fantasy novels, and NaNo helped me make huge progress with all of them. I also have NaNo to thank for helping me connect with local writers; I’ve been running a “shut up and write” group for several years now, and we’re a pretty tight-knit bunch.

  IFP: Book Two is called Prime Deceptions and is expected in 2020. For fans of Chilling Effect (like me!), can you give us any news about what’s coming next? Will the romance continue?

  VV: Trying to avoid spoilers . . . The crew’s adventures continue as an unlikely ally gives them a big job that turns out to be very personal for one of the characters, very problematic for another, and downright traumatic for Eva herself as it digs into dark places from her past. New planets to explore, new people to meet, new secrets to reveal, and more of the same wacky action from the first book. And yes, more romance! What can I say, I’m a sucker for power couples.

  Chilling Effect is available from Harper Voyager. Valerie Valdes attended the University of Miami, where she majored in English literature with minors in creative writing and motion pictures. She is a graduate of Viable Paradise and has taught classes in speculative short fiction writing. She also has over fifteen years of experience in copyediting for individual and corporate clients. Valerie has served as the Municipal Liaison for the Miami region of National Novel Writing Month for over a decade. She currently lives in Miami with her husband and children. Learn more about her on her website, candleinsunshine.com.

  7 Phantom Fares

  A haunting lyrical essay

  by Piper Daniels

  Japan, 2011. A magnitude nine undersea megathrust earthquake hits Tōhoku with such force it causes the earth’s axis to shift by several inches. Along the coastline, fifty fires ignite at once. An oil re
finery explodes into flame and a thick black smoke billows from that burning. Moments later, a 133-foot tsunami rushes over the land, swallowing buildings and fishing vessels with terrifying, inevitable speed. Bridges and roads are annihilated, and at the Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant three reactors experience level seven meltdowns. From video recordings, a man can be heard screaming, “We’ve lost everything. Here is like hell on earth.”

  The lucky few who aren’t swallowed up that day climb to the highest points of their roofs waving white flags in a desperate attempt to be rescued. From an aerial view, the flags look like ghosts floating up from doomed bodies, spirits tethered to the flesh in a rush to evacuate.

  As children raised in the evangelical faith, the Book of Revelation, which prophesies the end of the world, was little more than a bedtime story to my sister and me. To lie on our backs in the tall grass and look at the sky was an act of meditation meant to prepare us for the End Of Times, when Jesus would return and bring the whole galaxy crashing down.

  In spring, we watched the migratory birds head north for nesting, praying for their safe return along the flyway, between the breeding and wintering grounds.

  We read these birds have a neural connection between the eye and the part of the forebrain known as “Cluster N,” which becomes active during migration, enabling birds to literally see the magnetic field of the earth.

  We wanted to go where they could go, see what they could see. We wanted our bodies to be built like their bodies, all mental maps, compass points, instinct, and light.

  J. touched down into our lives one spring like a squall, then stayed on: a foul-smelling fog, a thick marine layer that would not lift.

  J. was a hero in town because a cop who was chasing him shot him in the back of the head with a taser and somehow, he ripped it out, hopped a fence, and kept running, managing, that time, to escape.

  We were not raised that way, to love boys like him, but she was tangled in him anyway.

  Forest for the trees.

  At a very young age, long distance migrant birds go their separate ways, forming strong attachments to potential breeding and wintering sights. Once the attachment is made it is rarely broken—the birds visit the same wintering sites every year.

  In the aftermath of natural disasters like the one in Tōhoku, reports of supernatural experiences increase exponentially.

  Five years after the earthquake and tsunami in Tohoku, Yuka Kudo, a sociology major, began writing her senior thesis on potential supernatural experiences that had taken place in the wake of the disaster. Kudo interviewed one hundred taxi drivers in Ishinomaki, the area that had been hit hardest. Many drivers refused interview, but seven of them reported remarkably similar stories—that of Phantom Fares. In each instance, a fare entered the cab, requested to be taken to a decimated location, and before reaching their final destination, vanished into thin air.

  “No ghost was ever seen by two sets of eyes,” wrote Thomas Carlyle.

  The most frequently cited of Yuko Kudo’s studies involves a cab driver in his fifties and the woman who got into his cab near Ishinomaki Station. The woman asked to be taken to the Minamihama district.

  “The area is almost empty,” the driver said. “Is it okay?”

  “Have I died?” the woman replied in a shaking voice.

  Perplexed, the driver looked over his shoulder and found that the woman was gone.

  Tōhoku police are now collaborating with exorcists in the area.

  She says it was good between them in the beginning. I tell her Heaven is ephemeral. That since Eve and Adam, Paradise has proved unsustainable. That even for far-ranging migratory birds who’ve made it to the tropics, paradise lasts but a single season.

  When the world breaks apart the way it did in Tōhoku, ghosts rise up to fill the void.

  In addition to the Phantom Fares, firefighters are repeatedly asked to respond to calls from a street that’s been washed away by the tidal wave. Mothers report that the toys of their dead children are moving on their own.

  Following the Antofagasta Landslide in Chile, sobbing and screaming has been ringing through the darkness for decades. A four-year-old boy dressed in white walks through walls and peers in people’s windows.

  Again in Chile, following the 2010 earthquake, shadows and disembodied screams rise from the bowels of the devastated parts of the city. Shadows can be seen crossing the Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez Bridge. Cell phones light up with incoming calls from disembodied voices that never quite connect.

  After the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, locals reported the spirits of wealthy foreigners stranded, lost.

  106 years following the 1910 Avalanche in Wellington, WA, reports of a ghostly woman humming and singing, reports of children playing, and screams so eerie they could only rise from the throats of the dead. “A century later,” one woman reports, “they’re still trying to find their way home.”

  I went once to the trailer park where my Sister and J. lived together. The furniture was expensive but littered with liquor bottles and overflowing ashtrays. I saw four-dozen holes in the wall she’d covered with posters. She was uncharacteristically quiet, and he stuck to her like a sun-warmed lozenge to a sweater. His pitbull ate my leather boot in a single bite.

  The night following the visit, I dreamt of the Odyssey, of Odysseus sailing beyond the dawn to the untouched, sunless edges of the earth. I watched the ghosts in the meadow of Asphodel flit like shadows.

  I woke with traces of the river Lethe on my tongue, remembering that to drink there was to be stripped of one’s identity.

  Sometimes a boy is not a boy at all. He is only a way to disappear.

  Despite what sophisticated navigators they are built to be, there are times when migrating birds lose their way. They fly past their destination in the spring overshoot, ending up too far north. Or in the case of reverse migration, a young bird’s genetic programming fails, and they end up as stranded vagrants thousands of miles out of range. Or in drift migration, when birds are simply blown off course. Or in abmigration, wherein birds from one region join those from another and end up migrating back, immersed in their new population.

  In many cultures, birds are seen as harbingers of death. They steal souls from the dying, embody spirits of the dead, or act as psychopomps, shepherding souls of the departed from this world to whatever comes next.

  Sparrows, for instance, are built slight and hollow of bone so they may carry home lost spirits of the dead.

  Sisters are similarly made so that whomever is lost may live on in the other one lightly.

  Many experts have tried their hand at explaining supernatural phenomenon that follows disaster.

  Theology Professor Hugo Zepeda claims that the psychological damage suffered by survivors of a single tragedy is so similar that they achieve a “collective projection, which means that they feel or see more or less the same things.”

  “The perceiver [of ghosts] is prepared for the experience on the basis of his or her having, so to speak, been eaten by pests. The condition is one of eroded defenses, of vulnerability,” Elizabeth Robinson writes.

  Some people believe ghosts roam the earth because of unfinished business.

  Others believe they remain because we are unable to let them go.

  I am hoping this boy is a broken mirror I can bury by moonlight.

  I am hoping my sister knows that the story of migration is a story imbued with the hope of returning, and because of that, I will lie in the tall grass between the wintering and breeding grounds, and I will watch for her.

  8 Riverdale, Writer’s Block, and Naval Warfare

  An interview with R.F. Kuang, author of The Dragon Republic

  by Holly Lyn Walrath

  There is no “perfect mood” for writing–when you’re on deadline, you just have to get the work done, whether you feel like it or not.

  R.F. Kuang

  If you’re into SFF books, you’ve probably heard of R.F. Kuang’s debut bestseller Th
e Poppy War (Harper Voyager 2018). It was a Goodreads Choice Award finalist (twice over), Nebula Award finalist, Locus Award finalist, and winner of the Stabby, Crawford, and Compton Crook Awards. Kameron Hurley calls its sequel, The Dragon Republic (Harper Voyager, 2019), “A blistering, powerful epic of war and revenge that will captivate you to the bitter end.” We can attest: This series packs a major punch of history, badassery, and grit.

  INTERSTELLAR FLIGHT PRESS: We love the book covers for The Dragon Republic & The Poppy War. Can you tell us anything about the behind-the-scenes decisions that lead to such a badass cover series?

  R.F. KUANG: I actually participated very little in the cover art! All the credit goes to JungShan, the artist, and the wonderful design team at Harper Voyager. The whole process was very smooth. My editor asked me if I had any ideas or preferences, and I said I thought perhaps a blue and silver color scheme would make sense–which, turns out, was what they already had in mind. JungShan created another illustration of Rin that I just absolutely fell in love with. We pretty much went with the first thing we came up with; we all liked it so much. I think covers for sequels tend to be easier, because you already have an aesthetic set up by the first, and you just need a variation on those themes.

  IFP: A little birdy told us that you love Riverdale. Are there any other shows or films you’re really into right now? Are there any shows that have influenced your writing?