When I first heard about In The Vanishers’ Palace being a Beauty and the Beast sapphic retelling involving dragons I knew right away I had to have this novella on my reading list as soon as possible. Putting together all these themes I love is an easy way to get me hyped about a story! So, when Aliette de Bodard answered my call for authors I was pleasantly surprised and eager to do this interview. If my short introduction to this book is enough to get you interested, I know her answers will get you to buy this book or to run to a library catalog to get a copy as soon as possible (like I did!).
Interview
Q1: The premise of your novella sounds so interesting and it caught my attention right away. Where did the inspiration come from for this tale?
I grew up with stories of fishermen who found dragon kingdoms under the sea, so the idea of a scholar falling in love with a dragon strongly resonated for me. I merged this story with a favourite of mine, Beauty and the Beast–I absolutely love the dynamic of a distant and fey person falling in love with a gentler one, but the consent dynamics of BatB are particularly bad, in the sense that it’s pure Stockholm Syndrome: one cannot possibly give consent to one’s jailer. This story was about rewriting Beauty and the Beast in a way that addressed the issues of consent and freedom and what love means, and it ended up being about post-colonialism as well, what it means to be left behind in a country ruined by war and exploitation, what it means to find one’s own destiny, and how to break the cycle of seeing other people as only resources.
Q2: As a writer of fantasy, science fiction and horror do you think there is one genre you find easier to write or do you have a similar approach for all of them in your writing?
I mostly horror as dark touches rather than full-blown horror: I don’t enjoy horror too much as a genre, because I would rather be comforted, or be taken to new places, to be challenged, rather than be scared. I do write science fiction and fantasy with equal ease, and very often mix them up, as in the case of In the Vanishers’ Palace, which merges elements of fantasy with more recognisable SF ones (the titular Vanishers and colonisers leave via spaceship, and their speciality is genetic modification, but the story also has magic). I have always the same approach for them, which is world first, in order to have the basic assumptions the characters apply to their own universe, and then characters, and last of all plot, which can only happen when I know enough about the characters, what makes them tick, and what sets them at odds with each other.
Q3: What was your favorite part about writing In The Vanishers’ Palace?
My favourite part was the seduction scene with the fruit. I come from two cultures (French and Vietnamese) where food is super important, and I wanted this reflected in the book. I wanted my dragon character Vu Côn to offer food as a way to my scholar’s heart, and obviously I got the occasion to put all of my favourite fruit in there! It’s also a way to underscore how different the world is: my scholar finds the untainted fruit unfamiliar and odd tasting, because she’s never had a rambutan or mangosteen that wasn’t rotten or poisoned, and so at the beginning there’s this tension of her not knowing if she can trust what she’s eating, that soon gives way to this awkwardness–and obviously to that very charged kiss at the end, and the scholar running away.
Q4: With so many types of dragon stories out there (which I love!) do you feel that you get inspired by them or do you try to create your own mythology?
I mostly draw on Vietnamese stories for mine, so my dragons are water spirits and they bring rain and floods, and live under the rivers, or in the seas. I gave Vu Côn a role of healer because that’s also powers attributed to them: I basically picked and chose in the stories that were familiar to me from my childhood rather than by modern books.
Q5: What’s the next step coming in your writing career?
I just finished my dark Gothic trilogy set in Paris, Dominion of the Fallen, with the publication of The House of Sundering Flames: it is basically my love letter to the French 19th Century classics, except with more queer people and more people of colour and more people who are both. I have a short story collection, Of Wars, and Memories, and of Starlight, coming out from Subterranean end of September, which includes an f/f Gothic comedy of manners, a bit of a big change for me in terms of tone. And I’m now working on my first space opera novel, which is going to draw from Vietnamese culture, and going to depict the wake of a bloody uprising in a galactic empire.
Q6: What advice would you give to writers who are just now exploring their first stories?
I can only give the advice I would have liked, which is personal, and may or may not work for everyone (which I think is a very important thing to remember, because sometimes writing advice just isn’t meant for a particular writer and just makes things worse). What I would have wanted to know as I was exploring my own stories, as a diaspora person raised in the West, is that it was ok to be writing in the traditions I grew up in–that being raised or belonging outside of a dominant Western Anglophone culture doesn’t mean that our stories and our cultures are being less worthy–and that it might take more time to find our own voices, but that it matters all the same.
About the Author:
Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris. She has won three Nebula Awards, a Locus Award and four British Science Fiction Association Awards, and is a double Hugo finalist for 2019 (Best Series and Best Novella). Most recently she published In the Vanishers’ Palace, a dark retelling of Beauty and the Beast where they are both women and where the Beast is a Vietnamese dragon (2018 Lammy Award finalist for LGBTQ SF/F/Horror). Recent works include the Dominion of the Fallen series, set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, which comprises The House of Shattered Wings, The House of Binding Thorns, and forthcoming The House of Sundering Flames (July 2019, Gollancz). Her short story collection Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight is forthcoming from Subterranean Press (Sept 2019).
Links:
Website || Bibliography || Amazon
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