Since the late 2000s, Charlie Jane Anders has been writing some of the most lively, outrageous, and engaging short Sci-Fi fiction out there. Former editor-in-chief of science fiction and fantasy website io9.com, her bestselling debut novel, All the Birds in the Sky, won the Nebula Award for Best Novel and was a Hugo Award finalist. Before that, her story, âSix Months, Three Days,â won the Hugo Award. She has had fiction published by McSweeneyâs, Lightspeed, and ZYZZYVA, while her journalism has appeared in Salon, the Wall Street Journal, and Mother Jones, among others.
We sat down with Charlie to discuss her new short story collection, Even Greater Mistakes, her start in writing, and the act of dreaming new worlds in unprecedented times. Click through to the end for insight into Charlieâs process, her thoughts on the sci-fi genre, and adapting work for the screen.
Tell us about your new book, Even Greater Mistakesâhow did it come to be, and whatâs the title all about?
I had been wanting to publish a full-length short story collection forever, and it never seemed like the right time. Until, at last, I was in the middle of publishing this young adult space fantasy trilogy, and @torbooks wanted to publish something between the first and second books. To my delight, we all agreed that a short story collection was the perfect choice.
Even Greater Mistakes was one of the alternate titles for my debut All the Birds in the Sky, and I felt it described these stories perfectly. All of these tales are about messing up, confronting your own fallibility, and finding yourself as a result.
Who is your favorite character in the book? Why?
My favorite story in the book is âLove Might Be Too Strong a Word,â about a space city with six different genders, corresponding to six different jobs. The main character, Mab, is a rebel who rejects the gendered oppression that everyone else on the ship lives underâyâs basically who I want to be when I grow up. I had so much fun writing yr.
Your book Never Say You Canât Survive is about writing new worlds amid a, shall we say, disappointing reality. What can writing achieve in the face of general doom?
I really believe that your imaginationâand your ability to spin made-up people out of your own psycheâare a lifeline when the world is going to a bad place. Since it came out, Iâve been overjoyed to hear from so many people who have been able to deal a little better with burnout, doom scrolling, and all kinds of horrible circumstances by writing their own fiction. Iâm more certain than ever that we can find freedom and joy and the means to survive inside our own fictitious worlds.
What makes dreaming about the future so transformativeâto both the dreamer and the reader along for the ride?
Contrary to what Fleetwood Mac seem to think, I donât think itâs possible for us to stop thinking about the future. Most of us constantly obsess about the good things we hope will happen, but also all of the worst-case scenarios that we are all dreading. So the real question is whether weâre going to take control of how we think about the future and consciously try to imagine better futures. I think that if we decide to put our energy into visualizing a happier world to come, weâll be closer to making it a reality.
How did you get your start in writing, and how did you find your happy place in your process?
In elementary school, I had a very severe learning disabilityâI nearly flunked out of first, second, and third grade. I was lucky to have a special-education teacher who took me under her wing and helped me master basic schoolwork by tapping into my creativity. She got me to write silly and obnoxious stories as a way of getting me excited about learning. Later, I wrote tons and tons of fanfiction. In high school, I was part of a group of people who did a collaborative storytelling project via an online bulletin board. Over and over again, I found that escaping into unreal places leaves me feeling more fulfilled and better able to cope with the so-called ârealâ world.
Tamsyn Muir probably doesnât need a lot of introduction here on Tumblr, but for those who arenât yet familiar with her work: Tamsyn Muir is the bestselling author of the Locked Tomb Series. Her fiction has won the Locus and Crawford awards. It has been nominated for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Dragon Award, and the Eugie Foster Memorial Award. A Kiwi, she has spent most of her life in Howick, New Zealand, with time living in Waiuku and central Wellington. She currently lives and works in Oxford, in the United Kingdom.Â
We asked Tamsyn some questions about Nona the Ninth, the next installment of the Locked Tomb series, which comes out on September 13. (Mild spoilers ahead. You have been warned!)
Can you tell us about Nona the Ninth? How would you contextualize it alongside the previous Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth?
The Locked Tomb has always followed a concrete set of rules about whose point of view weâre inâthereâs a priority list and a hard if-and-else-if set of codes about who is telling the tale. The priority character is always Gideon Nav herself, but after Gideon the Ninth, in many ways, she gets knocked out of the ring.
Nona is the next rule on the priority listâthe next storyteller. Except there are also a bunch of other storytellers popping up in the priority list as she lets her guard down. Thatâs kind of one curtain I wanted to pull back on The Locked Tomb as a whole. Whoâs telling this story? What is the truth as someone else understands it? Which is why, where the last two books have been told very much from the perspectives of the Nine Houses, weâre finally in a setting where the Houses have pulled back, and the truth told is completely different.
You have a knack for approaching the next part of the story from a completely different vantage point, which is deliciously frustrating for the reader. Why do you think this works so well (when really, it sort of shouldnât)?
Oh, but it does, and itâs been proved to workâjust play an RPG! One thing I passionately loved in Final Fantasy IX, my very favourite Final Fantasy at the end of the day, is that one moment youâre with the thief-turned-thespian Zidane and a wonderfully dashing attempt to kidnap a princess in the middle of a theater performanceâthen youâre withâŚsome very bizarre kid called ViviâŚwho has lost his ticket and is getting negged by a horrifying rat child. Youâre given a completely different lens on a completely different situation in whatâs basically a completely different genre. In the same game! Thereâs a risk of getting too comfortable in someoneâs truthâyou might want to settle down in a character whom you have learned to understand. But then you have to practice a very radical empathy in settling down in Nona, who just absolutely does not give a shit about swords or empire and, at her worst, can be quite an irritating, materialistic babe in the woods who is WAY too into dogs. Of course itâs alienating. If the experience of being in Gideonâs head was the same as being in Harrowâs as being in Nonaâs, there wouldnât be any point. If different vantage points didnât work, A Song of Ice and Fire would never have gotten off the ground. Hell, neither would The Iliad. I just sit longer with my vantage point.
After writing foul-mouthed and horny Gideon and acerbic, memory-challenged, and also horny Harrow, how did you approach writing Nonaâs character, and what did you enjoy most about the process?
Harrow would hate that you described her as horny. Gideon would be fine with being described as horny. Nona would love to sit you down and talk about all the things that make her horny, at the end of which you are 50% worried that she doesnât honestly understand âhorny,â and 50% worried that she DOES understand âhorny.â
Nona is my character who doesnât give a fuck. Gideon and Harrow both give too many. It was fun to write a character who sincerely seeks out love as she understands it, who has a large collection of friends and interests, and has no ambition. And yet what I really enjoyed is that Nona is easily also the most terrifying POV character of the series.Â
We meet some old friends in a new place in Nona. What aspect of the familiar characters meeting the unfamiliar world was the most fun to write?
Honestly, the fact that theyâre in such a different milieu was fun enough. One is a woman completely out of time, trying to find something to live for; two are dyed-in-the-wool Housers forced to re-examine values theyâve always taken for granted and what the next part of life after death is going to look like for them. All three are fish out of water. And then thereâs actually the reader meeting the familiar after two long books about the unfamiliar, and all the ways I hope thatâs entirely weird and recontextualizing. And then, for Nona, whatâs familiar to us is entirely unfamiliar to her. Writing Nona was like one long experiment with jamais vu.
âLesbian necromancers in space.â Whatâs not to love!
With Gemma, I wanted to write about someone who is going through a new “coming-of-age” later in life and having to learn who she is and how to be part of a relationship. I think many queer people, myself included, are familiar with feeling like they’re stumbling through another adolescence after coming out or leaving home. Too often, starting a relationship is the end of a story, but so often, that’s just the beginning—Gemma may love Vauca, but at the start of SOTFS, she doesn’t know how to do the work of that.
