Do you like dragons? Queer women in love? Fairy-tale retellings? Then you need to read Aliette de Bodard’s new novel,In the Vanisher’s Palace. It’s an utterly fantastic book which I adore, and it was released earlier this week, so be sure to get a copy. In the meantime, here to talk to me about it is the singular Aliette de Bodard!
Can you tell us a bit about your new book,In the Vanisher’s Palace?
In the Vanishers’ Palaceis adark retelling of Beauty and the Beast where they’re both women, and the Beast is a dragon. It’s set in a universe influenced by Vietnamese classic fairytales: Beauty is Yên, animpoverished scholar who struggles to find her place in her village community, and the Beast is Vu Côn, a dragon spirit of the river who can take on human form, and who’s got a strong sense of duty and a strong sense of care .
What do you think keeps drawing readers and storytellers back to fairy tales? And what drew you to retell “The Beauty and the Beast”?
I think fairy tales are true stories in a lot of ways: for many of us, they’re among the first stories of our childhood and form part of the bedrock of tales within us. They’re also old in the sense that they’re archetypal: they feel natural because they speak to the culture we grow up in, and also because the culture we grow up in keeps repeating them–it’s a bit of a virtuous circle really! I have a particular fondness for Beauty and the Beast: I loved the (abridged) Beaumont version I read as a kid, and it was one of the first Disney movies I got to see on the big screen. And obviously it’s got the amazing library in the Beast’s castle, which is my dream location! (and I totally deliberately put a magical library in my own palace in the book)
One of the things I was trying to do with this was to not only retell it, but also argue with it in a number of respects. The first one, obviously, being that it’s so normatively heterosexual and gendered, and that I wanted to make it a lot queerer. The second one was wanting to bring more of my own childhood stories into it, hence drawing from Vietnamese folklore with the marriages to dragon princesses, and underwater palaces, rather than French manors. The last one, of course, is that I love the fairy tales to bits, but I can recognise that it’s also deeply problematic: it’s textbook on skeevy consent–both Beauty’s original reason for becoming friendly with the Beast (he holds her captive and she has no say) and her decision to marry him (he’s dying and that’s again not much of a choice). What I was trying to do with the book was to discuss consent: when it’s meaningful, and how to have a relationship between equals where the free will and volition of both participants is respected, when the original situation was deeply unequal.
On a similar note, what are some of your favorite fairy tale retellings?
My absolute favourite one is Malinda Lo’sAsh, which is just a wonderful retelling of Cinderella with amazing worldbuilding. Another one I quiteliked is Helen Oyeyemi’sMister Fox, which isdizzyingly clever and with such lovely mastery of nested tales and language. And Karen Lord’sRedemption in Indigo,and (more remixing than retellings, Ibelieve)Nalo Hopkison’sMidnight Robber,andTerry Pratchett’sWitches Abroad.
I love how the world ofIn the Vanisher’s Palacemixes both fantasy and science fiction. What was the inspiration behind this choice?
I feel like the boundary between science fiction and fantasy is quite porous, and as a reader and writer both I’m really fascinated by the works that straddle it. I keep returning it to it (The House of Shattered WingsandThe House of Binding Thornsare both Gothic fantasy, but the ruined city that they take place in is really a post-apocalyptic one, in the wake of a devastating war). To me, it’s a chance to take tropes I really like from both and mix them up a little so that I have something very different.
Can you describe the process of publishingIn the Vanisher’s Palace?
Originally this was meant to be a novella, and a bit of a break after a lot of contractual deadlines. I was flirting pretty close to burnout last year, and I really wanted to write something that would be fun and that I could feel no pressure over completing. As I already mentioned,Beauty and the Beastis a favourite of mine, so I was dawn to retelling it. By the time I was finally done with the draft, it hadtipped over into short novel, which vastly limited the number of markets for it! My agent and I shopped it around without muchsuccess, and after it came back we sat down for a conversation on what to do: I decided to publish it via my agency, which was a bit of a terrifying process as I ended up in control of so many things that the traditionally published author never has to worry about (notably, marketing, which I’m very veryhappy to leave to others!). I got the manuscript edited into shape, and commissioned a cover for it (with art by Kelsey Liggett, and design by Rhiannon Rasmussen-Silverstein and Melanie Ujimoru). My agencyhandled the formatting and various sales channels, and some of the review copies.
On Twitter and in the blogosphere, we’ve recently seen a renewed conversation about motherhood and SFF fiction. Were you thinking about representations of motherhood when you wrote Vu Côn?
I’m a mother of two youngchildren, so it wasdefinitely very much on my mind. We’vegotten used, I think (in SFF but also in media) of seeingmothers that areeither absent or dead, and when characters have children these tend to be jeopardised for the sake of the plot and not have much of a personality (there are exceptions: I really like Kate Elliott’s and Justina Robson’s work, but also Scott Lynch’sRed Seas under Red Skieswhich has a wonderful set of toddlers, the children of a pirate queen). One of the things I wanted to do withIn the Vanishers’ Palacewas to have a character who happened to be a mother, and who had to deal with teenage kids–obviously they were a source of problems, but shedidn’t end up rescuing them! And the kids were very much their own characters with their own inner lives andtheir own goals.
While the world ofIn the Vanisher’s Palacecertainly has problems, I didn’t get the feeling that hom*ophobia and transphobia were among them. Can you talk some about queerness and worldbuilding?
I made a deliberate decision in this (and inmuch of my other work) of not writing hom*ophobia or transphobia in, because I wanted some stories where queerness was important and valid but also completelynormalised. Stories aboutdealingwith hom*ophobia and transphobia are very important and Idon’t want to deny that, but my goal here was to create a world where queer people could have their own stories and their own lives, and in particular get their own happiness. One trope that particularly annoys me is the death of the lesbian character (or of bi character in a relationship with another woman), which I see with annoyingregularity in stories and in media until it feels like being punched in the facerepeatedly, so obviously I wanted to make sure that wasn’t anywherenear my own narration.
I made the f/frelationship matter-of-factly upfront andcentre; there are multiplenon-binary characters (I wanted to makesurethat there were human non-binary characters,because I didn’t want the only NB character to be a shape-changing spirit, which propagates theidea that NB gender is only a thing for aliens rather than something realfor people in today’s world). One particular choice I made was tohave the Confuciusanalogy, the Broken-World Teacher, be non-binary–because they’re so valued and so central to magic, it makes a deliberate statement.
Part of the worldbuilding was making sure that people got to communicate their own pronouns: I was lucky there that Vietnamese has a lot of gendered pronouns, and that even the act of saying “I” is a choice of person’s owngender,relationship and relative age to the person(s) they’re speaking to.
What are you working on right now? Do you have any other new releases we should be watching for?
I’m working on book 3 ofDominion of the Fallen right now, with a view to finishing end of the month: it’ll still be set in the same Gothic ruined Paris, but focus on House Harrier, a class-rivenmagical faction in the southwest of Paris. There’ll be many returning characters, and as this is the last book in the trilogy,hopefully it’ll be a suitable sendofffor thecast! I’m also working on various short stories: look for one in Ellen Datlow’sEchoes: the Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories, forthcoming in 2019, which deals with haunted lands, racism and immigrants trying tosurvive and come to terms with the past.
About the Author
Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Obsidian and Blood trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies, as well as numerous short stories which have garnered her two Nebula Awards, a Locus Award and two British Science Fiction Association Awards. Her space opera books includeThe Tea Master and the Detective, a murder mystery set on a space station in a Vietnamese Galactic empire, inspired by the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.Recent works includethe Dominion of the Fallen series,set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, which comprisesThe House of Shattered Wings(Roc/Gollancz,2015 British Science Fiction Association Award, Locus Award finalist), and its standalone sequelThe House of Binding Thorns(Ace/Gollancz,2017 European Science Fiction Society Achievement Award, Locus award finalist).
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