1 00:00:00,060 --> 00:00:13,890 So we're talking today to Rebecca Kwan, who is the author of the popular series, a fantastic trilogy that has whose first book is the The Pulpy War. 2 00:00:13,890 --> 00:00:20,760 The second book is The Dragon Republic, and the third final book is The Burning God. 3 00:00:20,760 --> 00:00:27,600 And so, Rebecca, I think because this is a series of podcasts which is about fantasy, 4 00:00:27,600 --> 00:00:33,480 would you like to tell us why you decided to write in the fantasy genre as opposed to all the 5 00:00:33,480 --> 00:00:39,650 other kinds of genres you might have chosen or indeed straightforward versions of history? 6 00:00:39,650 --> 00:00:45,050 No, I get this question a lot, and I used to give a much more sophisticated answer, 7 00:00:45,050 --> 00:00:52,760 which had to do with the potential tabulation and fabrication and the way that speculative 8 00:00:52,760 --> 00:00:58,970 elements like magic can refract elements of our world in more interesting ways, 9 00:00:58,970 --> 00:01:07,820 like a prism. But to be honest that none of that crossed my mind when I sat down to start draughting the honest answer is just that. 10 00:01:07,820 --> 00:01:10,890 I grew up reading fantasy and I really love it. 11 00:01:10,890 --> 00:01:20,360 So when I was thinking about ways to incorporate all of my family history and my interest in Chinese history into a project, 12 00:01:20,360 --> 00:01:25,910 fantasy was the natural genre that came to mind because it was the world that I had lived in for so long. 13 00:01:25,910 --> 00:01:33,560 And and as I've gone along and progressed in my studies and finished out the trilogy, I, of course, 14 00:01:33,560 --> 00:01:41,810 discovered a lot of really empowering things that telling this as a fantastic story lets me do it. 15 00:01:41,810 --> 00:01:45,690 Let me focus on certain tropes and character types and of course, 16 00:01:45,690 --> 00:01:53,150 certain magical systems that you can't if you're just doing a historical retelling or a historical novel. 17 00:01:53,150 --> 00:01:56,780 But the honest answer is just that. I grew up loving it and that's why I wrote it. 18 00:01:56,780 --> 00:02:01,520 And I think all writers end up writing what they are enjoying reading at the time. 19 00:02:01,520 --> 00:02:08,330 Mm hmm. So what so what are then what advantages to fantasy did you discover while you were writing? 20 00:02:08,330 --> 00:02:14,360 So the problem with writing a historical novel is that you have to hear very closely to the historical record. 21 00:02:14,360 --> 00:02:22,610 Right. Which does it give you a lot of space to be flexible and hone in on the themes that you really want to. 22 00:02:22,610 --> 00:02:31,220 But fantasy has particular tropes such as the outsize importance of a single hero in determining the entire course of a nation's history. 23 00:02:31,220 --> 00:02:35,330 Right. And as we all know, the great man of history theory is a little bit silly. 24 00:02:35,330 --> 00:02:43,520 There are all these other factors involved in starting wars and ending wars and economic crises and regime changes, et cetera. 25 00:02:43,520 --> 00:02:51,350 But because fantasy readers are used to a single protagonist being that hero that changes everything for the world, 26 00:02:51,350 --> 00:03:02,290 you get to invest all of that symbolism, all of those metaphors, all of those things in a single person, which I got to do with my protagonist, Renee. 27 00:03:02,290 --> 00:03:08,750 And what's what fantasy did you grow up reading, what were your fantasy influences? 28 00:03:08,750 --> 00:03:16,670 I mean, the standardless right and Lord of the Rings, I so my dad gave me this paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings, 29 00:03:16,670 --> 00:03:23,090 but I was very young and I it was so heavy that I ended up ripping it into chunks so that much lighter for me to read. 30 00:03:23,090 --> 00:03:31,140 And I would read it everywhere. So I have this very waterlogged copy of The Return of the King because I used to read it in the bathtub. 31 00:03:31,140 --> 00:03:40,130 So that was a big influence. The Harry Potter books, obviously Pendragon books, Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card was another huge influence. 32 00:03:40,130 --> 00:03:47,090 And you'll notice that these are all fantasy novels written by old white men because that was what was available at the time. 33 00:03:47,090 --> 00:03:53,330 And I wholeheartedly love them. And I think it doesn't make sense to just cast out your influences. 34 00:03:53,330 --> 00:03:58,850 But, you know, as I got older and I read more widely and more was being published, I, 35 00:03:58,850 --> 00:04:08,000 I really came back to fantasy in my 20s and I'd fallen out of love with it for a bit because as I entered high school and started college, 36 00:04:08,000 --> 00:04:12,800 I realised there really was nobody in those novels that looked anything like me. 37 00:04:12,800 --> 00:04:16,250 And I didn't really feel myself represented by those books. 38 00:04:16,250 --> 00:04:22,100 But then when I was in college, I started reading people like Ken Lou and Anthony Jemison and Melissa Long, 39 00:04:22,100 --> 00:04:26,650 and I saw that there was this huge resurgence in or not resurgence, 40 00:04:26,650 --> 00:04:33,170 a new golden age, I guess, in the fantasy genre of voices that had not really been published or given a platform before. 41 00:04:33,170 --> 00:04:43,100 And that was tremendously exciting and inspirational. And that, I would say, has had more of an influence on my development as a writer. 42 00:04:43,100 --> 00:04:54,660 And do you feel you were kind of writing back in some ways against the old white men who were formative in your childhood reading? 43 00:04:54,660 --> 00:04:56,880 Maybe that was at the very back of my mind, 44 00:04:56,880 --> 00:05:05,790 but I don't think that writing purely as a response to somebody or as refutation creates very good stories. 45 00:05:05,790 --> 00:05:12,510 I think occasionally you get novels that are pitched entirely as some version of some other tropes. 46 00:05:12,510 --> 00:05:21,240 But unless they have something else to drive this story engine or if they unless they have some other source to service their heart, 47 00:05:21,240 --> 00:05:28,320 I've always found that those stories that only exist to write back, it's something else to be very unsatisfying. 48 00:05:28,320 --> 00:05:35,430 For instance, recently in my in a seminar I took with my advisor in modern Chinese literature, 49 00:05:35,430 --> 00:05:47,400 we're reading a piece of satirical fiction that was like very sarcastic retelling of this propaganda Chinese opera from from the 1960s. 50 00:05:47,400 --> 00:05:52,380 And and the the satire just made fun of all the characters, all the troops. 51 00:05:52,380 --> 00:06:01,110 It really cut them down, destroyed their nobility, you know, brought them to the lowest and most grotesque and humiliating forms possible. 52 00:06:01,110 --> 00:06:11,520 And you could see how that was a a response to the very noble, simple propaganda story that the original opera was. 53 00:06:11,520 --> 00:06:16,530 But as a story in and of itself, it it felt very flat and uninteresting to read. 54 00:06:16,530 --> 00:06:25,560 So I've never wanted to just write in response. I think a better description of what I and a lot of other newer fantasy writers are 55 00:06:25,560 --> 00:06:31,560 trying to do is to fill in the spaces that that have been left empty for so long. 56 00:06:31,560 --> 00:06:39,910 Mm hmm. So if if speaking back is sort of a very secondary concern and for good reason. 57 00:06:39,910 --> 00:06:47,470 What are you speaking to, what were sort of the questions that you set out to answer when you wrote this trilogy for yourself, 58 00:06:47,470 --> 00:06:51,000 for other people, sort of what were you writing towards? 59 00:06:51,000 --> 00:06:59,400 I think the popular trilogy was trying to make sense of something that felt fundamentally irrational, 60 00:06:59,400 --> 00:07:07,830 and what I mean by that is a lot of the greatest cause of 20th century Chinese history feel so 61 00:07:07,830 --> 00:07:14,610 extreme that it feels like you could not possibly relate to the people who make those decisions. 62 00:07:14,610 --> 00:07:20,820 Like we learn about things like the Cultural Revolution, about students stoning their teachers to death, 63 00:07:20,820 --> 00:07:26,200 about millions of people dying from starvation because of decisions made by party officials at the top. 64 00:07:26,200 --> 00:07:30,420 And we learn about this in history classrooms. And we think like, how could this possibly happen? 65 00:07:30,420 --> 00:07:35,430 This is insane, right? This is so out of the purview of the normal human experience. 66 00:07:35,430 --> 00:07:42,000 Like normal, rational people could not do these things. And so when I was reading about all this history for the first time, 67 00:07:42,000 --> 00:07:46,530 I was really struggling to reconcile myself with the fact that these things did happen. 68 00:07:46,530 --> 00:07:48,750 They're not fantasy. They're things that people lived through. 69 00:07:48,750 --> 00:07:54,390 The rape of Nanjing is something that, you know, people, survivors who are still alive today lived through. 70 00:07:54,390 --> 00:08:00,780 And I want to understand how people could do those things and also how people could survive those things. 71 00:08:00,780 --> 00:08:08,130 So one fundamental question that I've spoken a lot about in interviews is the popular trilogy tries to answer 72 00:08:08,130 --> 00:08:14,910 the question of how does somebody come outside and how does somebody go from being like a peasant backwater, 73 00:08:14,910 --> 00:08:22,740 nobody to a dictator who is in charge of an entire country and makes decisions that result directly in the deaths of millions? 74 00:08:22,740 --> 00:08:27,810 Because I don't think that we can just call him an insane monster and leave it at that. 75 00:08:27,810 --> 00:08:36,880 There is a much more necessary and interesting answer that has to do with a very warped version of a, 76 00:08:36,880 --> 00:08:41,950 you know, a doctrine that he really thought would be the salvation of his country. 77 00:08:41,950 --> 00:08:47,130 So so that's what happens to Rin's character arc over the trilogy. 78 00:08:47,130 --> 00:08:56,370 And did you do you find that your readers realise that you're addressing Chinese history in such an indirect way? 79 00:08:56,370 --> 00:09:06,370 Or do they do you find people getting in touch and saying, how can you even imagine such terrible things that they managed to make those connexions? 80 00:09:06,370 --> 00:09:12,010 So I think different readers have engaged with the text on very different levels. 81 00:09:12,010 --> 00:09:17,590 You have the kind of reader who really just isn't that familiar with Chinese history, 82 00:09:17,590 --> 00:09:26,710 was never taught it in school because the American school system doesn't really like to teach things they don't have to do with directly with America. 83 00:09:26,710 --> 00:09:31,930 And those readers have reached out to me and said, well, thank you for introducing me to this history. 84 00:09:31,930 --> 00:09:40,330 I was inspired to go do some reading of my own. I included a reading list for that sort of reader at the end of the paperback edition of the paper. 85 00:09:40,330 --> 00:09:46,870 And it's been really cool to see how many people have been brought that history because they recognised what the novels were based on. 86 00:09:46,870 --> 00:09:48,880 But I think there's another type of reader, 87 00:09:48,880 --> 00:09:55,750 and I mean specifically Chinese and Chinese diaspora readers who know exactly what the novels are about and can engage 88 00:09:55,750 --> 00:10:01,750 with it on a much deeper level because they understand some of the more sophisticated arguments that the novel is making. 89 00:10:01,750 --> 00:10:08,380 And I'll put a big spoiler alert warning here for anybody listening who hasn't read the trilogy yet. 90 00:10:08,380 --> 00:10:19,900 But the end of the Burning Guide was confusing and distressing to a lot of readers because they threw the entire trilogy, wanted Rin to win. 91 00:10:19,900 --> 00:10:23,860 They were rooting for the underdog, for the revolutionary. 92 00:10:23,860 --> 00:10:34,690 They wanted to see her succeed and completely overhaul these colonialist and classist systems that had been in place for so long. 93 00:10:34,690 --> 00:10:39,010 But obviously, she doesn't win. She she fails and she feels very badly. 94 00:10:39,010 --> 00:10:44,870 And the trilogy ends on an open question of what now is this. 95 00:10:44,870 --> 00:10:50,140 This country is going to be under the thumb of the West for quite a bit longer. 96 00:10:50,140 --> 00:10:55,420 So what does a democratic transition then look like? What does this failed revolution? 97 00:10:55,420 --> 00:10:59,050 What does the aftermath of this failed revolution look like? 98 00:10:59,050 --> 00:11:06,460 So a lot of people didn't like how it ended, but a lot of readers of Chinese dissent understood what I was trying to say with the ending, 99 00:11:06,460 --> 00:11:13,660 which was that we we know the version of history where Rin wins and it's the version that we're living with today. 100 00:11:13,660 --> 00:11:19,270 That's the PRC. But I'm trying to ask the question of what if the communists had not succeeded? 101 00:11:19,270 --> 00:11:25,300 What if instead we had a regime that was much more similar to the nationalists under Chiang Kai shek? 102 00:11:25,300 --> 00:11:29,770 And what if the future of China was more similar to what ended up happening in Taiwan, 103 00:11:29,770 --> 00:11:34,240 which was brutal and tragic and bloody and repressive in its own right? 104 00:11:34,240 --> 00:11:39,700 But could that have ultimately led to a more democratic, free nation like we see in Taiwan today? 105 00:11:39,700 --> 00:11:45,430 And we don't really know the answer? That's a big glaring counterfactual and we don't know the answer from history. 106 00:11:45,430 --> 00:11:50,470 So I certainly wasn't able to come up with the answer for a fantasy novel. 107 00:11:50,470 --> 00:11:52,900 But I wanted to leave on that note of complexity, 108 00:11:52,900 --> 00:12:01,930 which I think Chinese diaspora readers really resonated with in a way that readers completely unfamiliar with the history might not have understood. 109 00:12:01,930 --> 00:12:07,270 I think, again, without giving too much away the plot of the final novel, 110 00:12:07,270 --> 00:12:16,830 there's an increasing sense of impossibility that anything like that could occur in this world under these conditions. 111 00:12:16,830 --> 00:12:26,520 I think that fantasy novels or the fantasy genre has a real love affair with revolution and regime changes, 112 00:12:26,520 --> 00:12:34,620 but I think that a lot of fantasy novels centre on the the process of the initial 113 00:12:34,620 --> 00:12:41,310 revolution without asking difficult questions of what does that regime look like? 114 00:12:41,310 --> 00:12:46,260 What does the first 10 years of of the revolution entail? 115 00:12:46,260 --> 00:12:51,000 Who who suffers? Who wins? What is that transition like? 116 00:12:51,000 --> 00:12:57,630 What complicates that transition? And actually, one of the few sci fi novels I've read that actually addresses this head-on is Pierce 117 00:12:57,630 --> 00:13:02,430 Brown's Dark Age because he wrote an initial trilogy which was about that glorious, 118 00:13:02,430 --> 00:13:08,010 violent revolution. And you're rooting for the good guys the whole time you want them to to overthrow this dictatorship. 119 00:13:08,010 --> 00:13:13,620 You want this new republic. And then the next trilogy after that is all about the difficulties of running a 120 00:13:13,620 --> 00:13:18,570 republic and how it can very easily become its own worst enemy very quickly. 121 00:13:18,570 --> 00:13:28,350 So I wish more fantasy novels would deal with the fact that winning the initial battle doesn't mean that you've you've secured a glorious future. 122 00:13:28,350 --> 00:13:35,670 That really reminds me of what George R.R. Martin says about Tolkien and Aragorn saying 123 00:13:35,670 --> 00:13:41,310 Tolkien leaves us with our golden was wise and good and he wrote for 100 years. 124 00:13:41,310 --> 00:13:46,140 But Martin says, I want to know what was his tax policy? Did he have a standing army? 125 00:13:46,140 --> 00:13:50,610 What did he do about all the orcs, all these little baby orcs massing on his borders? 126 00:13:50,610 --> 00:13:56,400 But instead, we have that kind of and everything was lovely, even if there are problems in the shire. 127 00:13:56,400 --> 00:14:04,500 And we have a kind of sad ending of a sense of general decline than people passing into the West. 128 00:14:04,500 --> 00:14:16,720 But I think so many fantasy novels of that kind of golden age just stop with the triumph and say, and then they lived happily ever after in some form. 129 00:14:16,720 --> 00:14:18,730 Well, I'm glad you brought us back to talking, 130 00:14:18,730 --> 00:14:26,200 because the the way that the Lord of the Rings and it's one of my favourite things about those that book or, 131 00:14:26,200 --> 00:14:31,060 you know, that trilogy, the retroactive created trilogy, which is, you know, 132 00:14:31,060 --> 00:14:36,520 the the great battle is won and everybody goes home, but things aren't OK. 133 00:14:36,520 --> 00:14:41,140 The shire still needs to be dealt with. It's rotten and it's awful. 134 00:14:41,140 --> 00:14:45,970 And it's a really good reminder about how the war can end on a macro level. 135 00:14:45,970 --> 00:14:52,540 But that doesn't put out all of the little fires, which is also something that I try to address and the drag on the public and the burning God, 136 00:14:52,540 --> 00:14:59,650 because at the end of the puppy war, Wren wins the third party war in a very dramatic way. 137 00:14:59,650 --> 00:15:07,810 But that doesn't mean it's over because all of those troops didn't magically disappear or magically go home because there is no home to go to. 138 00:15:07,810 --> 00:15:13,090 There's still exist roving bands of Muthoni soldiers who are still terrorising the countryside. 139 00:15:13,090 --> 00:15:19,960 And one realises that by destroying their home country, she really hasn't resolved anything at all. 140 00:15:19,960 --> 00:15:25,780 They're still there. The violence is still going on. There is still little spots of occupation all over the country. 141 00:15:25,780 --> 00:15:34,900 And the question now is how to deal with that and which which really raises the stakes and raises the difficulty of what peace would look like, 142 00:15:34,900 --> 00:15:40,690 because peace is never brought about by a single, glorious victory on a battlefield. 143 00:15:40,690 --> 00:15:46,640 Mm hmm. Speaking of the sort of painful emotional realism of these books, 144 00:15:46,640 --> 00:15:51,740 one of the things that I enjoyed so much about reading them is the way that you took 145 00:15:51,740 --> 00:15:59,570 us through military strategy and described battles with such detail and realism. 146 00:15:59,570 --> 00:16:06,800 And you sort of made all of these decisions make sense in all of their incredible moral complexity 147 00:16:06,800 --> 00:16:10,670 and in the sort of sheer number of them write the number of battles that had to be fought. 148 00:16:10,670 --> 00:16:16,910 Where does that all come from? Where did where where did you obtain your understanding of military strategy? 149 00:16:16,910 --> 00:16:21,440 What was your synagogue just comes from a ton of research, 150 00:16:21,440 --> 00:16:27,230 because when I started writing the trilogy, I obviously have absolutely no military background. 151 00:16:27,230 --> 00:16:31,280 I don't have any training in military strategy or military theory. 152 00:16:31,280 --> 00:16:41,120 But what I did have access to was really good secondary and primary materials about all of the bloody conflicts of 20th century Chinese history. 153 00:16:41,120 --> 00:16:50,180 So there are excellent books. And Hans Vandeven, who ended up being my supervisor at Cambridge, actually worked on a lot of them. 154 00:16:50,180 --> 00:16:56,900 There are great books about the second set of Japanese war, which is it's the same thing as World War Two in China. 155 00:16:56,900 --> 00:17:04,730 And there are also great texts that make use of records that have recently been released or recently been. 156 00:17:04,730 --> 00:17:08,900 Scholars have been granted access to that detail on battle by battle, 157 00:17:08,900 --> 00:17:15,260 meeting by meeting the Chinese civil war and the first 10 years of communist rule, etc. 158 00:17:15,260 --> 00:17:25,760 So the fun part for me was to mine all of this stuff for crucial decisions or crucial battle strategies or tactics that I could turn 159 00:17:25,760 --> 00:17:33,020 into the heart of a chapter and then figure out ways to transpose it into a military setting where there aren't instant communications, 160 00:17:33,020 --> 00:17:39,590 there's no radio, there aren't planes, there are no trains, and in transportation is a lot slower. 161 00:17:39,590 --> 00:17:42,470 And obviously the weapons are a lot more rudimentary. 162 00:17:42,470 --> 00:17:50,280 And to ask with those same strategy still work or if they don't, what modified version of that strategy would work in this fantasy world? 163 00:17:50,280 --> 00:17:58,100 So it took a lot of tinkering with I do feel gratified that I've had reviews from people who were 164 00:17:58,100 --> 00:18:04,430 in the military or have experience with with military strategy or military history who have said, 165 00:18:04,430 --> 00:18:11,090 oh, I really like that. These novels deal with small scale tactics and battle logistics in a way that other fancy novels don't. 166 00:18:11,090 --> 00:18:17,450 But I'm also sure that I got a lot wrong just because I've never been in any of those situations myself. 167 00:18:17,450 --> 00:18:20,090 But whatever, I couldn't come up with something. 168 00:18:20,090 --> 00:18:27,530 History always came up with something better and my job was just how to present it in a very interesting way to the reader. 169 00:18:27,530 --> 00:18:33,890 And can we move on from history now a bit into the more fantastic elements of your world? 170 00:18:33,890 --> 00:18:39,500 And I understand that the the gods, for example, 171 00:18:39,500 --> 00:18:51,170 and much of the symbolism comes from traditional Chinese law and legend journey to the West and and other traditional Chinese mythological belief, 172 00:18:51,170 --> 00:18:55,280 if we can call it that. Can you say a little bit about that? 173 00:18:55,280 --> 00:19:06,010 How do you feel that you you just pull stuff straight from mythology or did you make some radical changes to traditional understandings? 174 00:19:06,010 --> 00:19:07,480 Well, a little bit of both. 175 00:19:07,480 --> 00:19:16,420 It was very sympathetic, so you mentioned the journey to the West and the legend of the Monkey King, and that was obviously a very big influence. 176 00:19:16,420 --> 00:19:24,340 It doesn't take a lot of squinting to see characters whose names are inspired directly from characters in that text. 177 00:19:24,340 --> 00:19:31,390 But a another text that was actually a larger influence is the function Yanqui or the investiture of the gods, 178 00:19:31,390 --> 00:19:35,950 which I sometimes describe as the crazier overlook to younger brother, 179 00:19:35,950 --> 00:19:44,350 to the journey to the West, because the drive to the West is is the grand epic that most people, most Western readers are familiar with. 180 00:19:44,350 --> 00:19:50,640 There have been lots of adaptations. There have been adaptations, especially into English in Hollywood. 181 00:19:50,640 --> 00:20:01,150 So that's instantly recognisable. But the message to the gods is more chaotic, I think more loosely structured, but far more interesting. 182 00:20:01,150 --> 00:20:11,020 The characters are really wild and the whole thing kicks off because the king of a declining dynasty writes a poem 183 00:20:11,020 --> 00:20:18,070 about the snail goddess Nula in her temple because he's seen a likeness of her and he can't contain his lust. 184 00:20:18,070 --> 00:20:22,000 So he writes out these words and she is understandably furious. 185 00:20:22,000 --> 00:20:34,060 So she sends the the the fox spirits who dug into the guise of a beautiful human made to seduce the king, become one of his concubines, 186 00:20:34,060 --> 00:20:42,100 and to influence him and turn him against his best advisers so that the country is is written apart by civil war, 187 00:20:42,100 --> 00:20:44,680 and then that that war becomes a story of epic. 188 00:20:44,680 --> 00:20:53,710 And there are lots of cool characters and and beasts and and myths and folk tales in between that that all fit loosely together. 189 00:20:53,710 --> 00:20:58,180 But it's a very I don't want to call it silly because they don't want to trivialise it. 190 00:20:58,180 --> 00:21:06,280 But it's funny to me because so many characters will just die in a single scene or characters will die and then come back without explanation. 191 00:21:06,280 --> 00:21:09,460 And there's not like a really satisfying resolution. 192 00:21:09,460 --> 00:21:16,840 It's all just a little wild and difficult to deal with which which is perfect for a trilogy like the popular, 193 00:21:16,840 --> 00:21:21,140 which is also big and sprawling and chaotic and difficult to pin down. 194 00:21:21,140 --> 00:21:23,830 So I borrowed a lot of characters from that. 195 00:21:23,830 --> 00:21:30,460 And once you start reading a summary of it, you'll see where characters like Jancsi and Sketchy came from. 196 00:21:30,460 --> 00:21:37,710 I didn't know that text at all. I must say, though, I'm quite excited to track it down and find that a bit more about it. 197 00:21:37,710 --> 00:21:47,480 So did you think that? There were, I guess, the question I wanted to ask about the the fantasy elements, 198 00:21:47,480 --> 00:21:56,220 I think in particular the Phoenix, which I found a really kind of terrifying force of madness, in a sense. 199 00:21:56,220 --> 00:22:01,190 Did you feel that you had to make up a set of rules for yourself about how you 200 00:22:01,190 --> 00:22:06,680 use the the fantasy elements that those things gods could do and couldn't do? 201 00:22:06,680 --> 00:22:14,570 Or did you feel that you would use them to do different things, that different parts of the trilogy? 202 00:22:14,570 --> 00:22:21,530 It was actually more important to me to convey a sense that this magic system really did not have rules, 203 00:22:21,530 --> 00:22:25,640 at least rules that could be easily understood because there are some basic rules, 204 00:22:25,640 --> 00:22:32,270 such as if you call the gods, then you're only your only two options are madness or death. 205 00:22:32,270 --> 00:22:44,960 But I, I a great frustration with a lot of fantasy novels that I have is that the magic system feels too cute and easily organised and easy to learn. 206 00:22:44,960 --> 00:22:48,110 And I think Harry Potter is a really good example. 207 00:22:48,110 --> 00:22:57,500 I think that it is never explained how if if you are able to competently point a wand and memorise a lot of Latin vocabulary, 208 00:22:57,500 --> 00:23:04,430 how you could possibly be a bad witch or wizard, it just doesn't seem clear like what the difficulty with this magic system is. 209 00:23:04,430 --> 00:23:10,040 And there are a lot of other magic systems and I won't name names, but it's just they're so poorly thought through. 210 00:23:10,040 --> 00:23:18,440 There are so many rules. They it's all just very neatly packaged so that it feels like in and of itself is science. 211 00:23:18,440 --> 00:23:21,620 And that's fine. There's a place for that sort of magic system. 212 00:23:21,620 --> 00:23:28,250 And I actually do like novels where magic is studied to the point of a science and it just becomes another branch of science or physics in that world. 213 00:23:28,250 --> 00:23:36,320 But with the magic system in the popular, I wanted something that felt uncontrollable and fundamentally unknowable, 214 00:23:36,320 --> 00:23:41,930 because at the end of the day, the characters are playing with divinity and they really don't know what they're doing. 215 00:23:41,930 --> 00:23:47,450 They know in a very basic sense, if you do this, you might be able to achieve this effect. 216 00:23:47,450 --> 00:23:52,640 But really, they're grappling with weapons far out of their understanding or controlling. 217 00:23:52,640 --> 00:23:54,590 It always ends very badly. 218 00:23:54,590 --> 00:24:02,990 And importantly, I wanted to have gods that didn't think or act or behave anything remotely similar to the way that humans do, 219 00:24:02,990 --> 00:24:12,440 because I really don't like when gods and fantasy novels are just human like entities that happen to live longer and have more powers. 220 00:24:12,440 --> 00:24:21,800 I think that being truly divine would change completely the way that you deal with people, with things, with concepts like time and future, 221 00:24:21,800 --> 00:24:30,830 life, death, etc. So it's repeated over and over again that the gods don't want anything and they don't have agendas the way that humans do. 222 00:24:30,830 --> 00:24:36,170 They are just fundamental forces of creation and and they oppose and balance each other. 223 00:24:36,170 --> 00:24:42,830 So you have fire which burns and you have the ocean which drowns and suffocates and you have healing and you have rotch. 224 00:24:42,830 --> 00:24:48,020 And they're just they just are what they are. They don't want things that the way humans do. 225 00:24:48,020 --> 00:24:52,610 And the characters in the popular trilogy really struggle with this because they keep trying 226 00:24:52,610 --> 00:24:57,770 to personify the gods and to understand them in a way that would make them more human life. 227 00:24:57,770 --> 00:25:04,430 But that that just doesn't work. And that causes really difficult theological questions. 228 00:25:04,430 --> 00:25:09,380 And for example, when you bring in the Westerners, the experience in the trilogy, 229 00:25:09,380 --> 00:25:16,460 they they literally call this magic system chaos because it obeys no known rules and they don't know what to do with it. 230 00:25:16,460 --> 00:25:25,820 So I at the end of the day, I just wanted this magic system to be really scary and unknowable and to convey the sense that the characters are 231 00:25:25,820 --> 00:25:32,570 playing with a very small bit of fire when there's a raging inferno that they have absolutely no control over. 232 00:25:32,570 --> 00:25:42,050 And and I think it worked, I felt like came across wonderfully because I kept thinking even once the experience had turned up. 233 00:25:42,050 --> 00:25:52,700 And I could see that the way the Western religious system operates in such contrast to the kinds of gods that you were describing. 234 00:25:52,700 --> 00:26:02,930 But I kept thinking somehow the gods are going to to rescue the situation or rescue Rinne or somehow they're going to make it OK. 235 00:26:02,930 --> 00:26:13,570 If I hadn't realised quite how much I was sort of personally invested in the, I guess the Judeo Christian notion that the gods actually. 236 00:26:13,570 --> 00:26:19,750 Care a little bit about humanity at some level, and they're going to pull their chestnuts out of the fire, 237 00:26:19,750 --> 00:26:29,320 and I know most mythological systems I'm interested in, the gods are only interested in humans because they want to get sacrifice out to them. 238 00:26:29,320 --> 00:26:35,470 They need to be fed by them in some way. But I kept thinking, now it's going to be all right. 239 00:26:35,470 --> 00:26:40,090 Now it's going to be alright, particularly with the with the kind of long march to the sacred mountain. 240 00:26:40,090 --> 00:26:50,350 I thought, well, when everyone gets there. And once again, my expectations that this was something I found all the way through your your trilogy, 241 00:26:50,350 --> 00:26:58,140 the expectations, I had both of plot and I guess of just being upturned all the time, 242 00:26:58,140 --> 00:27:05,290 I thought that was a remarkable achievement, I guess because I picked up the the first book not knowing anything about it at all. 243 00:27:05,290 --> 00:27:12,910 And I began to read it as if it was Harry Potter, a kind of Chinese Harry Potter and or whoever goes to synagogue. 244 00:27:12,910 --> 00:27:21,640 And then I began to realise by about the second hour of listening to the audiobook, I was in the wrong genre completely there. 245 00:27:21,640 --> 00:27:26,290 Well, that's nice of you to say. I always want to be creating something new. 246 00:27:26,290 --> 00:27:29,500 But also I wanted to say on the subject of gods, 247 00:27:29,500 --> 00:27:40,540 I think one easy connexion you can draw between the magic system of the popular and weapons and in the real world is nuclear weapons. 248 00:27:40,540 --> 00:27:45,190 And this connexion is very obvious at the end of of the popular, 249 00:27:45,190 --> 00:27:51,400 because the destruction of Japan is a direct parallel to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 250 00:27:51,400 --> 00:28:01,030 And, um, and and as we know from theorists like Hannah Arendt and so many other people who were writing during the Cold War and afterwards, 251 00:28:01,030 --> 00:28:07,000 the introduction of nuclear weapons of atomic bombs has completely changed the calculus of warfare. 252 00:28:07,000 --> 00:28:14,260 I think with nuclear weapons, we have really stumbled into something that we have no business messing around with, 253 00:28:14,260 --> 00:28:23,920 like destruction on that massive scale, the ability to just erase human lives so instantaneously without even that much thought. 254 00:28:23,920 --> 00:28:33,010 I mean, the literature right on on possible accidents and in ways that so many bombs 255 00:28:33,010 --> 00:28:38,070 could be launched at a second notice with with very little back and forth. 256 00:28:38,070 --> 00:28:42,700 It's really terrifying. And I wanted to convey that sense of this. 257 00:28:42,700 --> 00:28:48,970 This is a power that people really should not have that really should not be messed with in any time that you do mess with. 258 00:28:48,970 --> 00:28:57,190 It can't possibly end well, because I think playing with nuclear weapons is like playing with divinity and it's not something that we should be doing. 259 00:28:57,190 --> 00:29:03,430 Mm hmm. Is that why shamanism, is that why you chose that as sort of your your vehicle for magic? 260 00:29:03,430 --> 00:29:10,130 Because it allowed this sort of incredible metaphorical scope? 261 00:29:10,130 --> 00:29:20,810 I mean, again, back to my very first answer, but the honest answer is that when I was plotting out the trilogy, shamanism just seemed very cool. 262 00:29:20,810 --> 00:29:28,940 A magic system where the characters were calling down gods from the Chinese mythology was exactly the fun sort of thing that I wanted to work with. 263 00:29:28,940 --> 00:29:30,980 But obviously, as I kept writing the trilogy, 264 00:29:30,980 --> 00:29:38,670 I kept finding New Connexions that I wanted to work with to flesh out the themes that I come up with by then. 265 00:29:38,670 --> 00:29:43,170 Thinking about some of the classic terms for fantasy analysis, 266 00:29:43,170 --> 00:29:50,640 that one of the other really striking things about the supernatural is the the way in which Rin starts off, 267 00:29:50,640 --> 00:29:57,900 in a world where you make it very clear that people go to the temple kind of out of habit is sort of a social practise. 268 00:29:57,900 --> 00:30:06,060 But belief in the gods is nothing like a really profound Christian belief or Jewish belief even. 269 00:30:06,060 --> 00:30:16,770 It's it's a kind of mixture of superstition and custom and practise and the magic in the world, that kind of things. 270 00:30:16,770 --> 00:30:23,580 You don't expect these forces to become real and then suddenly you realise they haven't gone away. 271 00:30:23,580 --> 00:30:32,730 And there's a kind of intrusion of the magic called upas, as you suggest, by your shamans who don't quite know what they're playing with. 272 00:30:32,730 --> 00:30:40,440 Did you did you think that did you look at some sort of intrusion, fancy models, 273 00:30:40,440 --> 00:30:44,340 or did you think at all theoretically about the way that fantasy works, 274 00:30:44,340 --> 00:30:49,960 or did it just kind of come naturally from your your reading and understanding? 275 00:30:49,960 --> 00:30:54,250 Yeah, well, there I'm playing with an extremely common fantasy trope, 276 00:30:54,250 --> 00:31:04,120 which is that magic has disappeared from the land and these powers that once existed and were wielded by great heroes aren't aren't here anymore. 277 00:31:04,120 --> 00:31:07,900 And the world has become more mundane. But there's a dark force arising. 278 00:31:07,900 --> 00:31:13,960 And our protagonist is going to be the one who discovers these powers and brings it back to life. 279 00:31:13,960 --> 00:31:19,930 And we introduce its magic to the land. And there are so many fantasy novels that use this trope. 280 00:31:19,930 --> 00:31:26,950 But in the popular trilogy, I gave a political reason for the reason as the cause of magic disappearing, 281 00:31:26,950 --> 00:31:34,390 which is the Red Emperor who when he took over the country and unified it and turned it into an empire, 282 00:31:34,390 --> 00:31:43,180 he hit one of his greatest enemies and fears was shamanism and shamans, and he wanted it eradicated. 283 00:31:43,180 --> 00:31:49,360 So he waged a very good propaganda to to undercut these beliefs. 284 00:31:49,360 --> 00:31:58,210 Right. And and it was a literal war, too, because the as like the the law in the text goes, he rounded up the shamans, 285 00:31:58,210 --> 00:32:05,140 had them killed, had all of these local orders destroyed so that shamanism wouldn't exist in the empire anymore. 286 00:32:05,140 --> 00:32:11,890 So by the time Rinn comes along and the gods have been relegated to little temple rituals and 287 00:32:11,890 --> 00:32:19,510 superstitions and things that people do out of habit but they don't really believe in anymore. 288 00:32:19,510 --> 00:32:24,790 But there's there's another good question that I hope that the end of the trilogy brings up, 289 00:32:24,790 --> 00:32:29,830 which is maybe the Red Emperor was right and maybe shamanism should have been eradicated, 290 00:32:29,830 --> 00:32:36,730 or at least the ways in which shamanism was was practised in Nichiren because and this is a conversation 291 00:32:36,730 --> 00:32:42,400 that really nudger have constantly she thinks that shamanism is her birthright and it's a necessary weapon, 292 00:32:42,400 --> 00:32:49,270 especially against the West. And he who has a very different relationship to his God, who didn't become a shaman by choice, 293 00:32:49,270 --> 00:32:53,590 thinks that it's one of the most atrocious, terrible things that can happen to a person. 294 00:32:53,590 --> 00:33:00,520 And it's something. And he thinks that connexion to the gods should be completely severed and that the spirits are right, 295 00:33:00,520 --> 00:33:07,480 that it is a natural, that it's chaotic and it's awful. So I left a lot of these thorny theological questions unanswered. 296 00:33:07,480 --> 00:33:15,040 I mean, the question even of those whose beliefs are correct, the the the Curran's or the experience is, 297 00:33:15,040 --> 00:33:23,290 is also not resolved by the end of the burning God, because it's you're led to think during the Dragon Republic that these historians are crazy. 298 00:33:23,290 --> 00:33:32,170 Their maker is obviously not real. And their beliefs about the the Naqoura gods are wrong because as we know, the gods do exist. 299 00:33:32,170 --> 00:33:39,580 But then during the burning guide, the historians come up with a weapon that is effective in cutting off Rin's connexion to the Phoenix. 300 00:33:39,580 --> 00:33:46,630 So their their belief in science and in this divine architect has given them the weapons defectively counter, the Phoenix. 301 00:33:46,630 --> 00:33:51,310 And that's that's really terrifying because it turns everything that she knows about her world. 302 00:33:51,310 --> 00:33:55,690 And and I wanted to leave on that open question of we don't know who is gods are real. 303 00:33:55,690 --> 00:33:58,210 We don't know who is ultimately in control of the universe, 304 00:33:58,210 --> 00:34:04,480 and we don't know what level of engagement with the gods would ultimately be good for us, because I don't like answering questions. 305 00:34:04,480 --> 00:34:14,440 I just like opening them. One sort of theme that's been kind of coming up is that you sort of made these really smart, 306 00:34:14,440 --> 00:34:21,310 instinctive decisions when sort of building your fantasy world made choices that you because you wanted to. 307 00:34:21,310 --> 00:34:28,030 But that ended up being incredibly useful in terms of the message that you wanted to offer to your readers. 308 00:34:28,030 --> 00:34:38,570 So I suppose my question is, how do you feel like your style and approach sort of changed as you as you wrote, especially sort of across the trilogy? 309 00:34:38,570 --> 00:34:45,110 And what was it like to kind of come of age as a writer while you were publishing your first trilogy? 310 00:34:45,110 --> 00:34:48,800 I think about coming of age as a writer a lot, 311 00:34:48,800 --> 00:34:56,780 because this trilogy has dominated the years of my life in which I think people change the most and go up the most, 312 00:34:56,780 --> 00:35:04,310 I would say it was between the ages of 19 and twenty four that I wrote and published this trilogy and that that spans all of college. 313 00:35:04,310 --> 00:35:06,830 Right. That spans the first few years out of college. 314 00:35:06,830 --> 00:35:13,490 So I felt like a completely different person at the end of the burning God than than who I was when I started the popular. 315 00:35:13,490 --> 00:35:18,110 And I make it sound like when I started the trilogy and made all these smart 316 00:35:18,110 --> 00:35:22,220 and stated decisions that ended up being very good for the rest of the book. 317 00:35:22,220 --> 00:35:30,650 But I actually I was really frustrated with the the place that I left my younger self had left my cell phone. 318 00:35:30,650 --> 00:35:35,630 Because you're younger, less experienced is the worst possible writing partner. 319 00:35:35,630 --> 00:35:39,380 Because when I was 19 and draughting the popular, I thought, oh, cool. 320 00:35:39,380 --> 00:35:45,830 OK, let's let's throw in some references to the red junk opera that now will become important, I'm sure. 321 00:35:45,830 --> 00:35:50,930 I don't know what it is, but you know, the version of me that's writing a book, you can figure out the answer to that. 322 00:35:50,930 --> 00:35:55,190 And I never did find out an answer to that. It just wasn't something that I was interested in exploring. 323 00:35:55,190 --> 00:35:59,990 So I left that unanswered in 19 year old to me was also. 324 00:35:59,990 --> 00:36:05,120 So a lot of people think that the trifecta were planned from the very beginning, 325 00:36:05,120 --> 00:36:11,810 that the way that their story ends in the beginning, God is deliberate because it really seems to all come back full circle. 326 00:36:11,810 --> 00:36:18,830 And the trifecta as a trio are very good parallels to our main trio, Renee Gitai, and nudger. 327 00:36:18,830 --> 00:36:23,090 But that was one of the most difficult parts of writing the Dragon Republic in the beginning. 328 00:36:23,090 --> 00:36:30,380 God, because when I wrote the paperwork, the only thoughts that crossed my mind were I think these three people would be really cool. 329 00:36:30,380 --> 00:36:34,790 I don't know what their back story is. I don't really know anything about them aside from their powers. 330 00:36:34,790 --> 00:36:42,680 I don't even know what happened 20 years ago when supposedly some tragedy occurred and the trifecta fall from power, like who knows what's going on? 331 00:36:42,680 --> 00:36:49,550 Let's just insert this as foreshadowing and let myself answer this in the far future. 332 00:36:49,550 --> 00:36:55,790 So it took me a really long time to write the burning God, not because the writing itself was going slowly, 333 00:36:55,790 --> 00:37:04,280 but because I had to think up of an answer, think of an answer to a question I had deliberately opened without having any clue how to close. 334 00:37:04,280 --> 00:37:09,230 And that is something that I did not plan on doing again. 335 00:37:09,230 --> 00:37:15,680 So after the popular trilogy has been done for a while and I finished well, 336 00:37:15,680 --> 00:37:22,610 I'm actually working on a final spelling and grammar checks for what will be my fifth book today before I send it off to my agent. 337 00:37:22,610 --> 00:37:28,460 And I think the experience of writing to standalone following the popular ones have been really fun. 338 00:37:28,460 --> 00:37:37,330 It's been really nice to work in a completely different sandbox. And instead of the traps that I built for myself like five years ago. 339 00:37:37,330 --> 00:37:45,710 And I think the thing that's changed most about me as a writer is I'm much more deliberate about theme and structure going in. 340 00:37:45,710 --> 00:37:47,810 I think with the popular trilogy, 341 00:37:47,810 --> 00:37:56,990 I had these really grand ambitions for really difficult ideas that I just trusted myself to deal with and grapple with later. 342 00:37:56,990 --> 00:38:07,670 But Babul, which is the novel set in 1830 Oxford and is about student revolutions and colonialism, was much more deliberate from inception. 343 00:38:07,670 --> 00:38:14,390 So every single detail about the magic system, every single detail about the characters backgrounds, where they come from, 344 00:38:14,390 --> 00:38:19,190 how they interact with each other and their ultimate roles, and in what unfolds in X four and five, 345 00:38:19,190 --> 00:38:23,330 they're all very symbolically loaded and that was planned from the get go. 346 00:38:23,330 --> 00:38:31,490 So I think it's going to feel more assured and polished from the beginning to the end versus the popular, 347 00:38:31,490 --> 00:38:35,630 which I think you can really tell while you're reading it. It's an evolving shift. 348 00:38:35,630 --> 00:38:40,280 Boko Haram was a kind of big white board, was it? With everything that's. 349 00:38:40,280 --> 00:38:45,550 Were you writing it when you were still in Oxford or was that still. It's a planning stage. 350 00:38:45,550 --> 00:38:52,420 So I started at Oxford, I wrote a few scenes in particular, in particular wrote descriptions, scenes, 351 00:38:52,420 --> 00:39:00,490 because I have a really hard time talking about details and atmosphere unless I'm physically grounded in a place. 352 00:39:00,490 --> 00:39:06,790 So with the popular I took a trip to China and I saw a lot of war memorials. 353 00:39:06,790 --> 00:39:13,640 They climbed mountains. And that all helps with that kind of sense of immediacy in place in terms of the popular. 354 00:39:13,640 --> 00:39:22,330 And for Babul, it's an Oxford because I was in Oxford, so it was easy to write about the cobblestones, the red cam and the vaults and Garden Cafe, 355 00:39:22,330 --> 00:39:24,460 which did not exist in the 1930s, 356 00:39:24,460 --> 00:39:34,660 but which I have made exists in the 18 30s because I just I think it is rude to deprive my characters of those scones. 357 00:39:34,660 --> 00:39:42,790 But it wasn't. So I thought that I would have at least a year in Oxford to write it. 358 00:39:42,790 --> 00:39:48,430 But then, you know, March 20, 20 happened and I was stuck in Melbourne, Florida. 359 00:39:48,430 --> 00:39:53,180 I'm writing a book about Oxford, which I had just left and missed very much. 360 00:39:53,180 --> 00:40:03,250 So actually, a lot of the geographic details and building descriptions come from Google Earth and from 19th century manuals and guides, 361 00:40:03,250 --> 00:40:12,610 visitors guides to tools Oxford. And did you think about Oxford fantasy as you were writing the book, 362 00:40:12,610 --> 00:40:24,580 were you thinking about those the kind of Tolkien Lewis traditions of Oxford Fantasy or Pulman Eden, the kind of new a sort of Oxford fantasy? 363 00:40:24,580 --> 00:40:29,800 Or did you by going back into a 1930s past? 364 00:40:29,800 --> 00:40:37,930 Kind of. Leap ahead of those writers and create something even before Lewis Carroll, 365 00:40:37,930 --> 00:40:45,360 I guess that fantasy hadn't become synonymous with Oxford at the time that you're writing about. 366 00:40:45,360 --> 00:40:52,530 Well, I think the magical thing about Oxford is that it means so many different things to so many people. 367 00:40:52,530 --> 00:40:59,070 And while I love Philip Pullman's version of Oxford and well, I, of course, 368 00:40:59,070 --> 00:41:10,530 went to that pub where talking and Lewis sat together and they and their friends talked about literature and I participated in that fantasy. 369 00:41:10,530 --> 00:41:17,160 My version of Oxford, I hope, is really, really different from the magical versions of it that have come before. 370 00:41:17,160 --> 00:41:22,860 And I think uniquely, it's an exploration of Oxford from an outsider's perspective, 371 00:41:22,860 --> 00:41:29,130 not just to Oxbridge but but to the U.K. and really to the Western world. 372 00:41:29,130 --> 00:41:39,780 And I had a lot of fun writing this because I knew that as an American writing about England and about Oxford in particular, 373 00:41:39,780 --> 00:41:45,720 British readers were going to jump on any little slip up I made and say, no, it's not like that. 374 00:41:45,720 --> 00:41:51,180 You've got this wrong. But my way around that was to make the protagonist an outsider as well. 375 00:41:51,180 --> 00:41:58,950 So he is born in Canton and he comes to England when he's 10 or so and he comes to Oxford for the first time as a student, 376 00:41:58,950 --> 00:42:03,330 twenty, seventeen or eighteen. So all the things that were new to me about Oxford, 377 00:42:03,330 --> 00:42:10,260 like the fact that cubby-holes or mailboxes are called pages and all the slang that the students use, 378 00:42:10,260 --> 00:42:14,250 I've never heard terms like Michaelmas or Hillary or until I was at Oxford. 379 00:42:14,250 --> 00:42:24,120 All those things are new to the protagonist, Robin as well. So my confusions and my misperceptions and my amusement at the particularities of Oxford, 380 00:42:24,120 --> 00:42:28,320 I was able to write in directly into that character's experience of Oxford, 381 00:42:28,320 --> 00:42:36,420 which I thought was very clever of me because it gives me an outlet for when insiders say that I've done the wrong. 382 00:42:36,420 --> 00:42:43,620 Sometimes they will. We can't when is when this babble coming out, its up in August 20, 22. 383 00:42:43,620 --> 00:42:52,320 OK, well we can't wait for that, but there's hopes of your coming to Oxford for the tokin lecture next year. 384 00:42:52,320 --> 00:42:59,910 It's like the the plans are tentative. But right now the the idea is May 20, 22. 385 00:42:59,910 --> 00:43:02,820 Well, let's hope we can all cross the Atlantic by then. 386 00:43:02,820 --> 00:43:12,320 So thank you very much, Rebecca, for talking to us and look forward to seeing you in Oxford next year with a bit of luck. 387 00:43:12,320 --> 00:43:18,609 Thank you. Thanks for having me on. And for these fascinating questions, I had a really good time.