Episode 39: Kate Elliott Interview

Travis interviews science fiction and fantasy author Kate Elliott about her latest book, Unconquerable Sun. The book kicks off the space opera series The Sun Chronicles from Tor Books, and is pitched as gender swapped Alexander the Great in space.

Kate and Travis discuss the Hawaiian Islands method of writing, how to approach the world-building of new cultures, and the history of Alexander the Great.

Read our review of Unconquerable Sun here.

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About Kate Elliott

Unconquerable Sun

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Transcript:

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and was created by Gillian Gray (@GigiGlorius). You can find them at borrowedbookshelfreviews.wordpress.com

[intro music fades in]

Travis Tippens: Every now and then I find that book concept that just demands my attention. Consider this one. Gender swapped Alexander the Great in space. Now just how do you say no to that? 

Welcome to The Fantasy Inn where we share our love for all things fantasy, and discuss the broader speculative fiction industry. I’m your host, Travis Tippens. 

This week’s interview is with science fiction and fantasy author Kate Elliott. Her latest book, Unconquerable Sun, is the first in the Sun Chronicles series and was released yesterday. Kate and I discussed the Hawaiian Islands method of writing, how to approach the world building of new cultures, and the history of Alexander the Great. 

So without further ado, let’s just jump right into the interview and see what Kate had to say. 

[intro music fades out]

Travis Tippens: Kate Elliott, welcome to The Fantasy Inn.

Kate Elliott: Thank you.

Travis Tippens: Before I jump into the interview proper, I hear you’ve been world building spaceships since you were a teenager.

Kate Elliott: How did you hear that?

Travis Tippens: I’ve done a little bit of homework, listening to other podcasts and interviews you’ve given.

Kate Elliott: You clearly have. Yeah, when I was in what was then called junior high, and I believe is now called middle school, my brother and I drew a spaceship. We signed up all the kids in our classes to be different things. 

I was not the captain by the way, I wanted to be the astrogator. Then later when I got into high school, I realized I didn’t. I could do math, but I didn’t enjoy doing the math as it got harder and harder. So I kind of gave up that as a goal in life.

Travis Tippens: Yeah, that that seems like that would kind of be a necessary skill. If you were going to be helping navigate a spaceship.

Kate Elliott: Unfortunately, yes.

Travis Tippens: Well, then the first question I typically like to ask everyone is how did you first fall in love with science fiction and fantasy? And when did you decide to become a writer?

Kate Elliott: You know, I don’t know really why or when I first fell in love with science fiction and fantasy. I just know that from early on probably [age] eight, nine, ten, I wanted to read books that were, now that I look at them, that were science fiction and fantasy. 

We had the Scholastic Book Fair, like kids do today. Those are the books I would go in and look for, the ones that had some supernatural elephant, element, not an elephant, or a supernatural elephant too for that matter, I don’t know. Or a science fiction element. Those were the books I bought. 

Some of those books are still on the shelf of the home I grew up in where my mom still lives. It’s so funny to me to look at them because there is not a single one of those ancient old scholastic paperbacks that are just, like what I would call regular, mainstream fiction. They’re all science fiction and fantasy. So that is just what I gravitated toward.

I like to write and I started writing probably about 10 or 11. I started writing, I’m gonna say, seriously, as a teenager, what I mean by seriously as a teenager, as like [age] 14-15, when I really began to write stories that had beginnings and middles and ends. 

Again, I don’t know why I did it. I just wanted to write stories about a place that wasn’t rural Oregon, where I grew up. Maybe in part because I wanted to go to those places, and I wished I could go to those places. So it might have just been wish fulfillment.

Travis Tippens: I think that’s one of the things that I love the most about science fiction [and] fantasy is that anything at all is possible. So whether that’s wish fulfillment, or escapism, or just tackling issues, etc, in your everyday life, but from a different perspective, I think it’s just a beautiful genre.

Kate Elliott: I agree completely.

Travis Tippens: So moving on a little bit into actual writing craft. Back in 2011 on tor.com, you said that you prefer Tad Williams’ phrase, ‘Hawaiian Islands method’ over ‘pantser’ or ‘reverse plotter,’ or I guess these days ‘gardener’ versus ‘architect’ or ‘discovery writer’ versus ‘outliner.’ Is that still how you describe your writing style?

Kate Elliott: I do talk about it that way. The reason that that stricter dichotomy between ‘pantser’ versus ‘plotter’ doesn’t work for me is because I don’t totally write into the dark. I know some things that are happening. But I also don’t plot out the whole book and write an extensive 80 page outline so that I can just then sit down and write it. 

I need to add here that I don’t write all my books exactly the same way. I’ve had books that I basically, the first draft was all the scenes that I needed at that point. This would be for example, The Sword of Heaven, which is the second and third Jaran books. 

Basically, when I finished that first draft, and I went back to do revisions, I had to add two short scenes for clarity. Other than that, the book was structured exactly right, because I had been thinking about it for 10 years. But in other cases, I know some things that have to happen and how I get there, I don’t always know. 

So I don’t really feel like I fall into either spot. And the reason I like the Hawaiian Islands method, as a way to describe it, is exactly because those islands are like the tips of icebergs. See they’re much larger below the ocean than they are above the ocean.  When I’m writing, there’s places that I know I’m aiming for, that I can see, like I can see those islands. 

But to get between islands, I have to go underwater, where I don’t know necessarily what I’m doing. I’ll have things that I know I want, but also I’ll discover things as I’m getting there, that I couldn’t have come up with beforehand. Actually the process of going under sea is part of the process of coming up with ideas that kind of amaze me, or that startle me. 

So I like both parts of it. I couldn’t go without having an end in mind. But I also cannot, some things just drop into my head while I’m working. So that’s that’s why I like that description.

Travis Tippens: It’s a little appropriate, I guess, for you as well, given that you actually live in the Hawaiian Islands.

Kate Elliott: Right. Although I learned that phrase before I even knew or had any idea that I would ever live in the Hawaiian Islands.

Travis Tippens: Oh, really? I liked that phrase, even more then. So more recently, from a craft standpoint, you tweeted that the most frustrating part of writing novels is getting better at it actually makes it harder. Could you elaborate on what you mean by this?

Kate Elliott: Unfortunately, I can. As you get better at something, and this could be true, say, as a musician, or as a coder, or as a writer or you know, as a plumber, or really anything right? You gain skill. To some extent, as a better writer, there’s aspects of writing that I can do fairly easily now. 

But the problem is that the better I get at it, the reason I think it gets harder is that I have, partly it’s because I have higher standards for myself. Partly, it’s because as I write first draft, I can see what the problems are. And I’m not a person who writes a perfect first draft. 

Some people, as I understand it, and I want to make a quick tangent to say to anybody listening, that there isn’t a way that you write. There isn’t a way that you write a book. There isn’t the right way. There’s the way that works for you. So a lot of people use a lot of different processes to write with. 

Some people feel that a paragraph has to be right before they can go on to the next paragraph. So when they finish the first draft, they’re basically done with the book. I’m not that writer, I write kind of sloppy first drafts, probably because I’m doing so much swimming underwater in the Hawaiian Islands method. Then when I get to the end, that’s when I can finally begin to see the shape I need and then I do a ton of revision. 

When I was early in my writing career, when I was writing a first draft, I didn’t have strong expectations of how it needed to look. I couldn’t see the problems as much, partly. So I would just write a first draft. It was great. It was so much fun. I love doing it. I was like getting this story down on the page. how amazing is that? Then I would get to the end and someone would say, ‘Well you need to fix X, Y, and Z.’ And I’d be like, ‘How do I do that? I don’t know how to do that.’ So revision was stressful. 

But as I wrote over decades, and wrote multi, you know, 27 novels or more, now. I know better and better how to revise. Now when I write a first draft, I’m struggling against that need to revise. Except I can’t revise in first draft, I have to just write it down. 

So part of it is that struggle inside yourself against the thing in your head where you can envision what the book looks like. It gets sharper and more in focus, the more experience you have. For me writing first draft, I’m always a long way away from that finished look that it’s going to have. There’s a struggle between those two places, and that can make it hard. 

In addition to that, I think that a writer who challenges themselves with a more difficult project, and trying different things. For example, and I think we’re going to talk about this briefly later, I use, not just multiple points of view in Unconquerable Sun, but multiple points of view with different, they’re not all third person past. They’re different points of view with different tenses in them. 

I didn’t sit down and say ‘I’m going to do that.’ But when I realized I had to do it, that added a level of complication. Or book two, which I’m working on now, there’s a level of complication in it that sometimes I just want to beat my head against the wall. I’ll say to myself, ‘Oh, my gosh, I can’t do this, this is too much, it’s too big, it’s too complicated.’ 

I have to settle down and say two things to myself. One is that I can do it, I just need to be patient and go through the entire process, which I know how it goes. I have to trust myself. Then the other one, which is that it is harder, because I’m trying something I couldn’t have done 10 books ago. That’s kind of our goal, is to get better. You kind of can’t get better unless you keep challenging yourself.

Travis Tippens: Yeah. Just the fact that you say it’s harder now means that you are challenging yourself. This seems like the best way from a craft perspective to improve. So you’ve now namedrop, your latest book. Do you have a pitch for us for Unconquerable Sun?

Kate Elliott: Oh, I do have a pitch for Unconquerable Sun, and it’s short and to the point. It is gender swapped Alexander the Great in space. That is exactly what it is. I don’t even need to say anymore.

Travis Tippens: I will say that’s what first brought the book on my radar. It’s a very catchy pitch and like you say say it is exactly what it is on the 10.

Kate Elliott: It’s my best pitch ever, but only because it’s totally truthful.

Travis Tippens: I’m most familiar with a lot of your fantasy novels. As someone who’s written over 30 books over multiple decades, you have a lot out there in the world. But you don’t have as many science fiction. So I’m curious, what are the biggest differences for you between writing fantasy and science fiction?

Kate Elliott: I don’t really see many differences. For me, speculative fiction is a big umbrella that I consider personally, literature of the fantastic. Because the future stuff I write, and by the way, I should add that of my first eight novels, seven were science fiction. Then I switched to writing the Crown of Star series, which became the series I was best known for. After that, I continued to write fantasy. 

Those early science fiction novels, I mean, if you looked at the beginning of my career, I looked more like a science fiction writer. Which is just interesting, but a little bit of a statement about how science fiction maybe wasn’t as popular and as fantasy was in the 90s. in terms of differences between writing it, I kind of think, in both cases, I’m writing what I would call epic stories of adventure with a lot of world building, where I’m really interested in how the characters live in their worlds, and how conflicts play out. That’s always been what I wanted to write. 

So if there’s a difference, it’s just maybe in terms of science fiction, there’s stuff I don’t have to explain as much. If somebody gets on a train, or if I say they live in a republic, it’s closer, in many ways, to the modern world. It takes a little less explanation. In fantasy, I sometimes get a little bogged down in explaining because I want people to understand that it isn’t just an analogue for our world, that it’s its own place. I guess that would maybe be the biggest difference.

Travis Tippens: Yeah, and I know, even just like, flavor and how books can feel sometimes. Like for me, reading Unconquerable Sun, it’s this epic space opera. But it’s not that different for me as a reader than reading, say, an epic fantasy. It still has that sense of adventure. You’ve got those multiple point of view characters, you’ve got politics, you’ve kind of got this greater mystery out there and how the world works, and you’re trying to figure it out as a reader. I guess maybe there’s not those hard lines between everything.

Kate Elliott: Yeah. I mean, it’s not it’s not that I could just flip it over and turn it into an epic fantasy. There would be a lot of changes you would have to do to make that work. But yes, that’s what I’m going for, that sense of epic, that sense of movement, that sense of adventure, that sense of people interacting. 

I don’t write hard science fiction. I’m not here to describe or examine specific scientific concepts. The space opera setting is like an epic fantasy setting, [it] needs to be internally consistent. But it is a setting. It is its own world for the story. I’m not trying to tell a scientific story or an engineering story. Does that make sense?

Travis Tippens: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. That actually is a perfect segue as well. The story you’re trying to tell here parallels Alexander the Great. So my question is, why Alexander the Great? How much research into Alexander did you do?

Kate Elliott: Well, why Alexander the Great, I don’t know. But as I have said multiple times now, so I apologize if someone’s listening to this, who has heard me already say this, but I have three children, a daughter, and then twin boys. And one of the boys is in fact named Alexander after Alexander the Great. So I’ve been interested in that story. 

It’s such an interesting story about the person who does what seems to be impossible. This charismatic leader, and then they die so young, having done more than many others have done in much more time. But also it’s a story that Western culture, and I mean, the Romans in particular, really loved the story of Alexander the Great. 

And the medieval, there’s a lot of medieval versions of the Alexander story, which is collected in stories called the Alexander Romance, which are kind of legendary tales about Alexander. So he was also a very popular character throughout the medieval era.  There’s also a lot of Persian stories, and even into India and Arabian, that area of the Western Middle East or the Western Asia. 

So he himself became legendary. That aspect of his character both influences who we want to write about, right? We want to write about the people that we all talk about, because we perceive them as important, more important than, say, some poor woman living in a town that got besieged and attacked. Her story is deemed ‘Well, she’s just collateral damage.’ Which is an issue with storytelling in general and one of the ways in which storytelling becomes political. 

So I have to say, yes, I succumbed to the allure of the great charismatic leader. Except that I wanted to gender swap them. But I did a lot of research. I read a lot of books to the point where I’m kind of getting sick of reading books about that history and Alexander the Great. I don’t know what else to say about that. I’ve read a lot.

Travis Tippens: My follow up question to that would be, how closely do the Sun Chronicles follow this specific story of Alexander the Great?

Kate Elliott: On the one hand, it’s not spoiling anything to say that I definitely use the actual history as a template. The more people know about the history of Alexander, they’ll see the things that I’ve dropped into the book, and they’ll see the things that I’ve used in the story. In book one, for example, without spoiling anything, there’s a wedding banquet scene, and it is pretty much lifted from history. It reflects a supposed incident that really happened. 

Because I’m changing a lot of the background setting, because it’s set in space, it’s set in the far-far-far-future. It’s set in a world where gender isn’t the thing that people’s status or occupation, or what they can do is based on, though those things have like these huge ramifications. There have to be other reasons that people have fights and conflicts. So those affected what I do, and how I could handle the actual history. 

I don’t really want to go into too much detail, especially since I’m working on book two now. But to a great extent, I follow the actual history, but it’s all swapped in and out and fit to this other setting that I’ve created for it. Does that make sense?

Travis Tippens: Yeah, that makes perfect sense. I think that actually parallels what you were talking about with the Hawaiian Islands method. You kind of have these historical points that you’re trying to hit in a certain manner of speaking, but you’re also inventing your way there in ways around the historical texts.

Kate Elliott: Right. There’s so many things you can’t do exactly. One of the first decisions I had to make, and actually it wasn’t even a decision to make because I already knew what I wanted to do. But if I’m going to gender swap Alexander the Great, you have two options. 

You can create a story in which a woman overcomes gender discrimination to become a charismatic leader, or in which she’s treated as say, Elizabeth I, where people would say, ‘Well, she has the mind of a man.’ Or you can say, ‘I’m not going to write that. I’m going to write a story in which whatever gender this character was, that’s immaterial within the setting.’

But the thing is, it’s not immaterial to us as readers. That’s a significant difference, because we’re always going to read, or at least bring the early 21st century. We’re going to read the story of a charismatic leader, whose ability to lead is never questioned, as both Eirene’s and Sun’s ability to lead is never ever questioned within the society of this future history. 

That is a commentary on how much women’s ability to lead is questioned, say, in the United States right now and in the world right now. So I am making a commentary, even though to them it’s nothing, to us it’s something.

Travis Tippens: Absolutely. I suspect answering this might be a little spoilery. So feel free to skip past that if you like. But it’s pretty clear that Sun is the equivalent of Alexander the Great in the story. Are there any other characters that specifically map on to analogues of historical figures?

Kate Elliott: There are some specific analogues, there are some adapted analogs, there are some combined analogs because actual history is too complicated and too filled with too many people and places to accurately place. People just couldn’t manage all those different places. They couldn’t manage that Philip, Alexander’s father, fought in Thrace and in Illyria and Epirus and the upper Macedonian provinces, not to mention Thebes and Sparta and Athens. I mean, not all, it’s complicated. See, it’s already complicated. But you can’t throw all those names down. 

We haven’t even reached the Persian Empire yet, right? The fact that Anatolia at that time was many Greek city states that had been conquered by the Persian Empire many generations before. That level of complexity and history is too much for a novel like this. You have to collapse those things down. 

What that means is that there are a few very specific analogues and obviously Sun is Alexander. And I don’t mind saying that Eirene is the Philip analog. So that was Alexander’s father, Philip. And that João is the Olympias analog that was Alexander’s mother, and that Hetty or Hestia is the Hephaestion analog. 

Beyond that, there are some other specific analogues. And as I said, some adapted analogues where I’ve maybe combined people or added an extra role to somebody, or given someone a role that they did. I mean, it’s just to combine things out. But I don’t want to talk about anything else. Because one of the things I think readers who know the history will enjoy doing is trying to figure out who’s who.

Travis Tippens: Without getting into their actual historical identities, with a lot of your point of view characters that you’re writing from, you play around with different grammatical tenses. How did you choose which tense to use for each character? What effect are you hoping to achieve with readers?

Kate Elliott: I didn’t choose to do this. I say that in a weird, I say that, absolutely, honestly, it’s like it chose me. I knew that I wanted to write, I knew Persephone had to be written from first person. I just liked the sound of present tense for her better because I tried writing her both in present tense and in past tense,. It just felt better to my ear, and it felt better to the way she narrates that she would be in present tense.

Zizou is then set, you know, he’s in third person. So he’s a step back. But again, his points of view didn’t feel right in past tense, because, I don’t know, maybe because he’s a person who’s all about action. I couldn’t write it in third person. 

Then Apama, being from the enemy’s perspective, I wanted that little extra distancing factor. So it was easy to write her from third person past tense, which is a very standard way to write something. I do think it gives a little more distance. But also, she wasn’t a character who wanted to talk about herself in first person anyway. 

Then Sun, I actually toyed for a while in the very early days of working on this, like three years ago, of not giving Sun a point of view of at all. But I realized eventually that I simply couldn’t do that, that I had to do it. Because that kind of, Sun as a character is very daunting. It’s a mindset that it’s hard to find. It’s a mindset that’s both huge, like galactically universally huge, and almost unfathomable, and yet also very narrow. So for me, it was a challenge to, and kind of scary to think, ‘Well okay, I’m gonna try this from her point of view’. But knowing that when I did that, then I had to give myself that step back of doing it in third person, past tense. There’s another reason I do her point of view in third person past tense, but I can’t tell you what it is because it would be a spoiler.

Travis Tippens: You were saying that third person past tense gives a little bit of extra distance. And for me, at least, when I read something, the extra distance for like these big larger than life, like legendary characters, that kind of adds to that aura of greatness around them.

Kate Elliott: You know, it’s interesting, because I’ve written, I have a thing about in my writing, about writing about these charismatic leaders. I don’t know whether it’s that the role is fascinating to me, or whether I’m fascinated by my own fascination with the role and kind of annoyed by my fascination with the role since I’m not really in favor of large scale conquest and wholesale oppression. 

Yet I find this character interesting. But in the other cases I have the character Camjiata in the Spirit Walker trilogy, the character of Captain Anji in the Crossroads trilogy, the character of Bakhtiian in the Jaran books. Oh, and my first one, Alexander Jehane, in the Highroad trilogy, who is in fact named after Alexander, or that’s why he gave himself that name. 

I don’t know about Crown of Stars, there isn’t really such a character in Crown of Stars. But all four of those characters are all seen from outside, they have no point of view. 

Travis Tippens: Huh. 

Kate Elliott: So you never find out what their interior thoughts are. You only interact with them as someone from outside them. I did that because I didn’t want to get it try to get into their points of view. So Sun’s the first time I’ve been trying to do this character riff from the inside. So it’s been, it’s been challenging to do it.

Travis Tippens: Yeah. It’s almost like you’re continuing to push your creative boundaries. 

Kate Elliott: Ah, why!? I mean, that’s what we do though, right?

Travis Tippens: Yeah. One thing I’m curious about, and I realized there’s probably not like a direct analog for all of these, but what sorts of real world influences went into the various cultures [in Unconquerable Sun]?

Kate Elliott: I wanted to be really careful about not mapping the Alexander history and those cultures, straight on to this one. I didn’t research Persian culture and do a faux Persian culture. Partly, it’s because the setup is so totally different that it doesn’t work. Partly, it’s because this is meant to be set in the far-far-future of our own timeline. That’s the fantasy element of this story, actually.

So I wanted a connection. Because I had to make a choice between having no connection to earth and earth cultures at all, to totally make up everything. Or to set it so far in the future and have such a separation from Earth, that the understanding of the people who in this setting, which is like three to four thousand years in the future from now, their understanding of Earth is kind of like our understanding of ancient Sumeria, we have some pot shards, right, and some writing that we can decipher. 

But we can’t really say we know what it was like to live in Sumerian culture. We can’t really say we know who they were and how they thought about themselves except for our interpretation of some of these fragments. 

I wanted to create a setting that had a fragmented view of the place they came from, which they call the Celestial Empire. I also thought about the demographics of earth today, and how that might play out in the demographics of this far future, who would have been on these generation ships that went 1000 years journeying before they reached a place where they could find planets to settle. 

So I chose to suggest that a significant number of the population demographically is descended from Han Chinese, and this isn’t as obvious in the book and may not be as obvious, from India. Because South Asia and East Asia and as well Southeast Asia, you know, if you add together India, China, Indonesia, add on the other Southeast Asian countries, Japan, Korea, that’s a significant number, demographically, compared to the rest of the world. 

So I wanted to make sure that the cultural elements that had come through, even if they were not… it’s not future China. For one thing, I can’t write future China. I’m not the right person to write that. I’m not Chinese, I don’t speak Mandarin. I didn’t grow up with that culture. I don’t understand it. I love to read books set in a future that grows out of China written by people who can actually write that. But at the same time, I wanted to create futures where what has come down through the generations are aspects and specific, kind of like foundational elements, culturally. 

So for example, [the writer] Ken Liu, a friend of mine, and I asked him, Ken, ‘What would like three or four things be that if there was 1000 or 2000 year gap? What things would the people on these ships still have?’ And he said, ‘Well, they would have,’ I mean, this is what he thought, right? He said, ‘Well, the characters, you know, the ideograms, the writing system, which is very cherished and important, the connection to ancestors,’ and there’s a couple of others. 

If you look at Chaonia, for example, you’ll see elements of those things kind of embedded in how that culture functions, as well as some aspects of Macedonian culture, which I wanted to put in. For example, Eirene’s peers, who are like her companions, are the marshals who are her age, the people she grew up with, they call her Eirene. They don’t call her Your Majesty. 

That has to do with the way Macedonian noble culture and the relationship between the king and the free citizens or the free men. It was a different cultural thing than you would see, say in Louis XIV’s France. I wanted to also show that, so I blended those things together.

Then in terms of the other cultures, I went other ways with them. The Phene culture, there’s a whole long story about how I’ve been developing that. It’s kind of embedded in the book, the hints are there. The Yele league is based on the idea of academics, so there’s jokes about how they’re so fixated on grammar, I don’t know. 

And there are planets in the Yele League, I mentioned, like once, a lot of them named after ancient universities, from across the world, things like that. So I’m trying to suggest these fragmented views of the ancient past, that they have used to build how they think that their society is now.

Travis Tippens: You’ve touched on this a little bit already. But you also make a lot of deliberate choices regarding gender and gender roles and the societies that you’ve created for Unconquerable Sun. So can you talk a little bit about some of these choices and why you made them?

Kate Elliott: I’m not quite sure what you mean. What did you see as choices about gender?

Travis Tippens: Certain things I’ve noticed, like in the Phene military, they don’t say sir, they say ma’am.

Kate Elliott: That’s just the Phene. But yes, among the Phene, they say ma’am, instead of sir, but that’s just the generic term they use. And the Queen Marshal in Chaonia. The individual is Queen Marshal, whether they’re a woman or not. So Eirene’s older brother was also Queen Marshall.

Travis Tippens: Right. I know that in particular stood out to me.

Kate Elliott: Yeah, that actually, there’ll be a little more. I don’t want to say too much. There’ll be a little more about why the baseline for how people talk about authority tends to be female. In book two, there’ll be more about that there. I don’t want to, I don’t want to give anything away.

Travis Tippens: Yeah, no spoilers.

Kate Elliott: It has to do with the history. It has to do with this kind of longitudinal history and where the earliest settlers set up and how they set up. 

Travis Tippens: I think I can speak for most of you readers that I am fascinated by that and I can’t wait to discover where that goes. So looking forward to the future a little bit. It’s kind of an interesting situation that you’re in where your release day for Unconquerable Sun is almost simultaneous with another story you have coming out. So what can you tell us about “The Long Walk” your short story in The Book of Dragons anthology? 

Kate Elliott: Yeah, it’s actually the same day. That wasn’t my planning, I had hoped it would not come out exactly the same day. The Book of Dragons anthology was created and edited by Jonathan Strahan. It’s coming in a kind of a deluxe hardcover, because it’s going to have illustrations, each story will have an illustration by Rovina Cai, I think that’s her name. He [Jonathan Strahan] just wanted dragon stories. 

The initial idea for “The Long Walk” was my initial idea for the story. Then I spent about a year, because fortunately he had a long lead time, coming up with different ideas, because I didn’t think I could make it work. And that if I did make it work, that he wouldn’t want it because it’s just a story about a widowed woman who in her society, if you’re widowed, if your husband dies, you’re then considered officially dead. And I thought, ‘Well, who would want this story, I can’t make it work.’ I tried two or three different story attempts, and they didn’t go anywhere. 

Then one day, I just realized that it was like a scroll, that she starts in one place. She wakes up in the morning next to her husband who’s dead. That’s I think the first sentence so it’s not a spoiler. Then each of her movements, she moves from that room, into the hallway, she goes downstairs, but she never goes back into any place that she was before. So it’s always a long walk into a new place. 

Once I had that in my head, the story just fell into place. I basically wrote it in one long, you know, it probably took me a couple weeks, but I basically wrote the story in one long thing about this journey, she goes, after she is officially legally dead, she’s legally dead. But of course, she’s not dead. What happens to her then?

Travis Tippens: I love that symbolism of “The Long Walk”, like you were mentioning, in addition to the literal, long walk in the story. I wish I’d picked up on that when I read it. But I find that fascinating. So also looking towards the future. You said you were working on book two right now for the Sun Chronicles? 

Kate Elliott: It’s all I’m working on. Yeah.

Travis Tippens: So Furious Heaven. I see online it still says late 2020. I imagined that…

Kate Elliott: I don’t know why it says that. I would say next year, late next year. 

Travis Tippens: Okay.

Kate Elliott: I mean, listen, it can either be fast or it can be good. And since my name is gonna be on it, I want it to be good. 

Travis Tippens: Absolutely. I know that’s everything you say you’re working on at the moment. Do you have any future plans to tackle anything else?

Kate Elliott: Ah, I can talk about right now. Maybe, maybe sooner? Maybe soon? I don’t know.

Travis Tippens: All right. Fair enough.

Kate Elliott: I’ll just leave it mysteriously like that.

Travis Tippens: Centering the stories of women is such a central theme throughout your entire career, and almost all of your work. Are there any books with similar core themes that you’d recommend?

Kate Elliott: I want to mention the recent novella from earlier this year called Empress of Salt and Fortune. It’s a tor.com novella by Nghi Vo. N-g-h-i is her first name, Vo is her last name. It’s a lovely short, but also in its way epic, story that deals with empire and change, very large change and the position of women. It’s all centered from women’s perspectives in a really lovely way. 

One of the things I loved about it, the way it’s structured, is through examining the objects of daily life. There’s a series of objects that the character who’s narrating the story will say, ‘Oh, look at this bowl.’ And then a part of the story, a part of the history gets told because of the bowl. So this way that material objects of daily life are used to tell this greater story is just absolutely fantastic. So that’s the example I would use for today. There’s many more but let me stick with one.

Travis Tippens: This is a rather badly timed question to be asking now. But I always like to conclude with what’s something that you’re just really excited about right now?

Kate Elliott: I’m hoping that, in Hawaii, we’re in I think stage two reopening because we do have low, very low case loads right now and we’re not having a big spike in cases. The next stage would be stage three. What I’m really looking forward to is that canoe paddling club is restored so that I can go out paddling again. That’s what I’m most excited about. Outrigger canoes for those who don’t know.

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Travis Tippens: I hope that that happens soon. Kate Elliott, this has been such a pleasure. Thank you again for coming on the podcast.

Kate Elliott: Thank you, Travis. It’s been great. Thank you.

Travis Tippens: You can find Kate Elliott on Twitter as @KateElliottSFF or at her website kateelliott.com. Unconquerable Sun has dinosaurs, sea monsters, blind seers, epic space battles, and the sci fi equivalent of American Idol. And that’s barely scratching the surface of what makes this book so fun. 

As always, you can find us over at thefantasyinn.com or click the invite in the show notes to join our Discord server, where you can hang out with us in real time and find more books than you’ll ever be able to read. 

If you enjoyed this interview, consider supporting us on Patreon. We are so close to being able to upgrade our microphones. And of course, don’t forget to subscribe to this show so you can catch all of our future episodes. 

That’s all for this week. Until next time.

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