Interstellar Flight Magazine Best of Year One

by Holly Lyn Walrath

  Last but not least, how would you like some good, old-fashioned SPACE WARFARE? (I don’t know why but it just seemed wrong not to put that in caps. It feels like a phrase that should be accompanied by trumpets and fanfare, no?) Here’s where I go off on a slight tangent: Where is the line between space opera and military science fiction? Is there one? Should there be one? I personally read both, and for me, it’s more of a sliding scale than an either/or situation. I guess if the book is strictly about military personnel with no other space opera trappings (like a galactic empire) then it doesn’t belong under the space opera umbrella. Usually, though, for some books, the needle swings more toward space opera, some more toward military science fiction. Okay, tangent over.

  Anyway, if you’d like some fun and snarky SPACE WARFARE with a side of queer romance you could try The Widening Gyre by Michael R. Johnston (Flame Tree Press, 2019). (I need to add a small disclaimer here that Michael is a close friend of mine, but this book has been getting great reviews and buzz so I feel good including it.)

  Other Space Warfare books that I’m excited for are the “space caper” Finder (DAW, 2019), from Hugo award winner Suzanne Palmer, and the bonkers-looking Gideon the Ninth (Tor, 2019) by Tamsyn Muir which smashes fantasy (think swords and necromancy) with sci fi (think spaceships and intergalactic politics). And the cover is FANTASTIC, and yes, I do judge a book by its cover. Sorry. Not sorry.

  Last but not least, the second novel in Gareth L. Powell’s Embers of War series, Fleet of Knives (Titan Books, 2019), features a former warship helping a mysterious generation ship in deep trouble with some dangerous aliens.

  15 Goth Weirdness, Slavic Folklore, and Ohio

  An interview with Emily A. Duncan, author of Wicked Saints

  by J.T. Morse

  I like making things and then breaking things.

  Emily A. Duncan

  What do the state of Ohio, lovers of Slavic folklore, and the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency have in common? Spec fiction author Emily A. Duncan. Born and raised in Ohio, Emily works as a youth services librarian when she’s not putting pen to paper to fashion thrilling YA fantasy novels. Her latest book is Wicked Saints (Wednesday Books, 2019). Interstellar Flight Press contributing writer J.T. Morse had the splendid opportunity to grill this quirky Kent grad/lover of Dungeons & Dragons about all things Emily A. Duncan.

  INTERSTELLAR FLIGHT PRESS: From your public bio, one could glean your educational background and your love of video games and Dungeons & Dragons. But we’re curious to hear about the deeper elements of what makes Emily A. Duncan tick and why you write the type of stories you do.

  EMILY A. DUNCAN: I like making things and then breaking things.

  When I was a kid, my brother and I would both get LEGO sets for Christmas, and then I would build all of them because he would lose interest. Writing a book—building a world—isn’t that much different for me. I like the act of construction and deciding what might mirror our actual world and what might . . . not. The core of what I write, I think, and what is most interesting to me, is investigating the lines between humanity and monstrosity (and sometimes divinity) and how those lines might intersect. Sometimes that’s the act of construction, but more likely, it’s the act of destruction, just like knocking apart all those LEGOs.

  IFP: Seeing as Wicked Saints is somewhat of a dark fairy tale, were you a fan of fairy tales when you were a child, or did the love of folklore come about, for you, as an adult?

  EAD: I always took a particularly keen interest in the villains in fairy tales.

  My mom always likes to tell me that I wanted to play the role of the big bad wolf in any productions of ‘the three little pigs’; which, who wouldn’t? But I definitely took a more dedicated interest in them when I was in college and grad school. It was then that I really started delving into Slavic folklore.

  IFP: Did you know that Wicked Saints was going to be a part of a trilogy when you started, or did the concept for the Something Dark and Holy trilogy come along after you had finished writing book one?

  EAD: I thought it was going to be a duology!

  Book one was going to follow Nadya and book two would follow Serefin and, while that still is the case, it was my agent who suggested it become a trilogy. Having written the second book, there is literally no way I could have wrapped up everything in two books! And I’m a big fan of the structure of trilogies, so I’m happy with how it worked out.

  IFP: Tell us a bit about your experience publishing with Wednesday Books, including whose idea it was to use deckled edging for the pages.

  EAD: Working with Wednesday Books has been amazing!

  I feel deeply lucky to be able to work with them. It’s a very good feeling to have a book that is, frankly, weird and have everyone on your team just get it so completely. I think it was my editor’s assistant who suggested the deckled edges because it would make the book look more like a blood mage’s spell book!

  IFP: Let’s talk cover design. Covers are so vital to the book-selling industry these days; they are the face of the story. The cover for Wicked Saints bears some interesting details. Without giving any spoilers, can you explain how some of the elements and images on the cover relate to the story?

  EAD: It’s very goth and very metal, much like the book.

  It took a long time to get to the cover that’s on the shelf now and I adore it! It doesn’t actually show a particular element that is in the book—Maybe the monastery? But that’s only in the book for a chapter—but rather, it invokes the atmosphere of the book really nicely. I love how intricate and oppressive the building is, and that it, kind of, looks like it could be the cover of some random Gormenghast edition.

  IFP: Can you give our gothic-fantasy hungry readers any news about the status of the next two books in the Something Dark and Holy trilogy and maybe speculate as to when they might be hitting shelves?

  EAD: If everything goes as planned . . .

  I’m finishing up book two now and it’ll be out sometime in early 2020! I call it my cosmic horror forest road trip book. It is deeply weird, and I love it a lot. Book three is in the very early stages, I’m still hammering out how it’s going to all finish up, but it will follow along in early 2021.

  IFP: Heading home, where would you say is the creepiest or most YA horror-story inspiring place to visit in Ohio? And, while we’re on the subject, are there any writing festivals or literary conventions in Ohio that readers and/or writers should know about?

  EAD: Oh, Ohio is super haunted.

  I grew up in southern Ohio, and while I never visited the local haunted house site in my hometown, I grew up in the kind of woods where you didn’t really have to go very far back into them to stop hearing any kinds of sounds of civilization. But the Hocking Hills were nearby, and there were all kinds of creepy places in Old Man’s Cave. There’s a place called the Devil’s Bathtub, and it is both beautiful and slightly terrifying. When you drive into Clear Creek Park, there’s a giant rock hanging over the road known as the Witch’s Rock. The whole state is haunted. And Ohioana and Books by the Banks are two very good book festivals in Ohio!

  IFP: Lastly, we would love to get three six-word sentences from you: one about Wicked Saints, one about your experience of being a writer, and one about something bizarre or obscure about Emily A. Duncan. Thanks for indulging us.

  EAD:

  Wicked Saints: Gothic weirdness drenched entirely in blood.

  Writing: Both exhilarating and tedious at once.

  Me: I like to keep my secrets.

  There you have it, readers, straight from the goth-writer’s mouth—all that you need to know about Emily A. Duncan and her latest release Wicked Saints, book one of her Something Dark and Holy YA fantasy trilogy. For links to her work and ways to purchase her books, check her out on glitzandshadows.tumblr.com.

  16 No Room in Narnia

  Revisiting childhood classics as an Atheist

  by Erin Becker

  My particular inability to lose myself
in these worlds as an adult is tied to my no longer believing.

  Revisiting beloved childhood novels can be a fraught process. So it was with some ambivalence that, as part of the research for my MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts, I picked up my old copies of C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950) and Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time (1962).

  My edition of Lion has a color map on the inside back cover, one I’d been obsessed with as a child. It features a drawing of Aslan, his mane set off in crimson light against an epic night sky. And I’d reread my copy of Wrinkle so often as a kid that the spine is held together by masking tape now turning stiff at the edges. When I sat down with them, I was ready to go back through the wardrobe and greet Mr. Tumnus again. I was ready for Aunt Beast to wrap me in her warm furry arms.

  I was also aware that both Lewis’ and L’Engle’s stories were deeply informed by Christian theology. As a kid, this influence was a plus. I was the girl who went to church every week, wrote poems to Jesus in my journal, and taught Sunday School as soon as I was old enough.

  But by my mid-twenties, I was an atheist. There was no scene at the dinner table, no stomping out of the church after a bigoted sermon. Just a slow unwinding of faith until I didn’t believe any of it anymore. Leaving the church was so anticlimactic that sometimes I forget how important being Christian was to me, until it wasn’t. But I got a reminder of just how fundamental this shift has been when I tried to go back through the wardrobe into Narnia, to tesseract with Meg one last time.

  When I was young and religious, these writers took me on adventures that not only felt deeply imaginative but also deeply real. Aslan gave his life to save Narnia, and this “magic from before the dawn of time” mirrored the power of Jesus’ resurrection. When, in Wrinkle, Meg and Charles Wallace spot the evil Black Thing while visiting the planet Uriel, they watch Uriel’s inhabitants fighting the malevolent force by dancing and singing a loose translation of a few verses from the Old Testament. The lyrics reminded me of a song I sang in church. I could finally be a part of the mythic battle.

  But what once felt like an opening up to the weird and the wonderful around me now feels like a closing down. The Christian worldview that seemed so mysterious and all-encompassing when it was the only one I knew now seems like a limited narrative decision. In Lion, the New Testament allegory is so literal, the assumptions so assumed — that the Emperor is good because he is the Emperor, that humans should have power because they are human — that rereading it felt like I was trapped in a wardrobe myself. A wardrobe that would open not to a magical world, not to some unknowable core of things, but simply to another wardrobe, and another, on and on into a tautological infinity.

  L’Engle’s work leaves a little more room for ambiguity than Lewis’ does, like when Mrs. Whatsit gives Meg “her faults” as a gift, foreshadowing how they’ll “come in handy” when she travels to the planet Camazotz. Yet these moments of gray shade into black and white when Meg must face evil directly. Mrs. Who tells her, “The foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” What once read as subtlety now seems like a uniquely Christian brand of paradox, copied and pasted from every Sunday morning of my childhood. It felt like L’Engle had promised me the stars — then given me a Bible lesson on the hand of God in the night sky.

  I don’t think you have to be Christian to enjoy these books. I definitely don’t think being Christian means you’ll enjoy them, either. (Wrinkle, in particular, has been critiqued by fundamentalists for its secularism.) But I do think that my particular inability to lose myself in these worlds as an adult is tied to my no longer believing. Turning the books’ yellowing pages feels a little like the last time I took communion. A glistening cup. The smell of old paper. The moment the wine-sip reaches the tongue. The way the words sound in the mind. The ritual is the same, sure. But the signifiers no longer hold any meaning.

  17 Korean Folklore, Big Space Explosions, and Mathematics

  An interview with Yoon Ha Lee, author of Ninefox Gambit

  by Michael Glazner

  Folkloric creatures don’t necessarily follow rules as though they came out of Dungeons & Dragons. Rather, the rules and constraints that Min has to confront are usually social and ethical more than rules of magic.

  Yoon Ha Lee

  Yoon Ha Lee is not only a master of short fiction but is also known for complex folkloric space opera that redefines the genre. He is the winner of the 2016 Locus Award and a nominee for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Arthur C. Clarke Award. The New York Times called Ninefox Gambit (Solaris, 2016) “A tight-woven, complicated but not convoluted, breathtakingly original space opera.” Following his Machineries of Empire trilogy, Yoon Ha Lee has released Dragon Pearl, a middle-grade space opera under Rick Riordan’s imprint (Disney Hyperion, 2019). Dragon Pearl tells Min’s story: a thirteen-year-old girl descended from fox spirits, who leaves her planet to find her brother.

  INTERSTELLAR FLIGHT PRESS: What made entering into a partnership with Rick Riordan to publish Dragon Pearl attractive? Why was this the best way to tell Min’s story?

  YOON HA LEE: Two reasons: When my daughter, who was then a tween, learned I had an opportunity to write for Rick Riordan’s imprint, I knew she would have killed me if I’d turned down the opportunity! She’s a big fan of Rick’s.

  And the other reason is money. Middle-grade science fiction pays much better than adult science fiction, on average. My daughter is now fifteen and in ninth grade, which means we’re soon going to be facing her college bills.

  As for Min’s story, that’s actually the other way around. I didn’t come up with Min and her world until I had to devise a proposal for Rick Riordan Presents. I was thrilled that Rick was promoting mythology-based fiction from many cultures, and I figured that no one else was going to be pitching Korean mythology space opera.

  IFP: What makes a story qualify as space opera? What are five must-read/see space operas and why?

  YHL: My criteria are very simple: big space explosions, bigger-than-life personalities, and lots of adventure, although there are lighter and darker varieties of space opera. My five would be:

  Star Wars—pretty much the one you have to know if you’re going to write in the genre.

  Margaret Weis’ Star of the Guardians series, which follows an exiled lady starfighter pilot, the king of a lost dynasty, an ambitious warlord, and more.

  If you like the grimdark edition, I’m fond of the over-the-top bloodfest that is Warhammer 40,000. I don’t play the miniatures game because it’s spendy and the thought of painting that many minis makes me want to hide, but it’s a lot of fun.

  Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy, wherein a ship’s AI exiled from its own body seeks revenge for the death of its beloved captain, setting in train a series of events no one could have anticipated.

  Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Die Neue These — an intensely political anime in which two starfaring powers and their respective military geniuses face off. If you like that, the novels by Yoshiki Tanaka on which it’s based are mostly available in English translation, and if you’re really hardcore, you can also look up the original anime (Die Neue These is a remake).

  IFP: The Machineries of Empire trilogy hinges on mathematical rules and axioms. What rules and constraints will readers see Min struggle against in Dragon Pearl?

  YHL: I played fast and loose with Korean folklore in Dragon Pearl, and in any case, folkloric creatures don’t necessarily follow rules as though they came out of Dungeons & Dragons. Rather, the rules and constraints that Min has to confront are usually social and ethical more than rules of magic. She has the power to shape-shift and can use it for the first time, but as she learns, just because you have power doesn’t mean you know the right time to apply it.

  IFP: What universal archetypes will readers find in Dragon Pearl? Which archetypes showed up in Dragon Pearl that also made appearances in Machineries of Empire?

  YHL:
Both Min from Dragon Pearl and the undead general Jedao from Machineries are tricksters; appropriately, both are associated with foxes. Min’s friend Haneul is a loyal, studious friend who is always about following the rules—I’m pretty sure that personality type has existed since there were rules to follow. And her other friend Sujin is a troublemaker, although maybe not as much of one as Min herself. Beyond that, there’s the dragon pearl itself, one more magical artifact in a parade of artifacts out of folklore and imagination.

  IFP: What ideas or themes do you return to in your writing, and what has that told you about yourself?

  YHL: Warfare, imperialism, culture clashes, math. A pretty good reflection of my nonfiction interests. My mother finds my fascination with military history completely baffling, but she still enables me when I ask for research help!

  IFP: What ideas do you hope readers of Dragon Pearl walk away with?

  YHL: Mostly, I hope readers have a fun time with the book. If any of them are inspired to write their own stories, of whatever kind, that would be excellent!

  Yoon Ha Lee is the author of the middle-grade space opera Dragon Pearl and the Machineries of Empire trilogy. His short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Lightspeed Magazine, Clarkesworld Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and other venues. He lives in Louisiana with his family and a very lazy cat—and has not yet been eaten by gators. Check out his website YoonHaLee.com to read his back catalog of short stories.