I’ve been doing a lot of interviews lately, and it’s been hard to keep track of them. I post them on Twitter or FB usually, but I wanted to point to this one in particular since it contains a lot of behind-the-scenes info on The Fifth Season and the Broken Earth trilogy. MASSIVE SPOILERS HEREIN, and I strongly do NOT recommend you listen to it if you haven’t read TFS. But for those of you who’ve read the book, you might find it interesting. A great Skype-based interview with Mahvesh Murad of Midnight in Karachi.
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Hi,
I listened to this podcast a few days ago, and it’s actually had me in a bit of turmoil. It feels as if you’re trying to distance yourself from the genre of fantasy, particularly epic fantasy. As a reader and fan it’s always seemed to me as if your work is giving the genre a much needed infusion of fresh blood–both by being fresh blood and by being in the genre. But in this interview you seem to be presenting yourself as not even a part of that genre?
I feel that the major flaw of epic fantasy hasn’t been that there are too many hero’s tales, but that there haven’t been enough different kinds of heros. I will be quite surprised if Essun (or whichever identity she takes on next) does not end up being a hero. Especially since she started out as an unappreciated child in a rural village, discovered she had special powers, has been wrestling with/resisting her destiny, and recently got a magic sword. (Essun: not the hero the Stillness needs, but the hero it deserves. :-P)
TFS is very much it’s own wonderful new thing, but from my perspective as a reader it’s also in coversation with epic fantasy and post-apoc scifi that came before. Part of my delight in reading it was recognizing almost equal amounts of literary fingerprints from Wheel of Time and Parable of the Sower. I mean, that’s a hell of a combination of influences. It made me very happy to see that someone could identify the legitimately powerful and interesting aspects of the WoT magic system, strip out the sexist and gender essentialist BS, and weave what was left in a wonderful new story. The gritty details of a journey through a civilization falling apart under clouds of ash, of a powerful female protagonist (and former teacher from a walled-in community, to get kind of specific) forming a new kind of community in a new reality–well, to me it felt like echoes of PotS.
Maybe I’m totally off base and these are all coincidences. Maybe I am hallucinating nods to other things I like just because I like them.
I don’t want to seem as though I’m attacking/accusing or saying that you aren’t original. You are amazingly original, and you absolutely have a very distinctive voice and approach. I just wanted to pipe up and mention that, to me, it seems unfair to say that your work is not at all in conversation with past SFF writers, and I wonder if, this being a live interview, you meant to indicate such a strong disconnect between the two?