So we're talking today to Rebecca Kwan, who is the author of the popular series, a fantastic trilogy that has whose first book is the The Pulpy War. The second book is The Dragon Republic, and the third final book is The Burning God.
And so, Rebecca, I think because this is a series of podcasts which is about fantasy, would you like to tell us why you decided to write in the fantasy genre as opposed to all the other kinds of genres you might have chosen or indeed straightforward versions of history?
No, I get this question a lot, and I used to give a much more sophisticated answer, which had to do with the potential tabulation and fabrication and the way that speculative elements like magic can refract elements of our world in more interesting ways, like a prism. But to be honest that none of that crossed my mind when I sat down to start draughting the honest answer is just that. I grew up reading fantasy and I really love it.
So when I was thinking about ways to incorporate all of my family history and my interest in Chinese history into a project, fantasy was the natural genre that came to mind because it was the world that I had lived in for so long. And and as I've gone along and progressed in my studies and finished out the trilogy, I, of course, discovered a lot of really empowering things that telling this as a fantastic story lets me do it.
Let me focus on certain tropes and character types and of course, certain magical systems that you can't if you're just doing a historical retelling or a historical novel. But the honest answer is just that. I grew up loving it and that's why I wrote it. And I think all writers end up writing what they are enjoying reading at the time. Mm hmm. So what so what are then what advantages to fantasy did you discover while you were writing?
So the problem with writing a historical novel is that you have to hear very closely to the historical record. Right. Which does it give you a lot of space to be flexible and hone in on the themes that you really want to. But fantasy has particular tropes such as the outsize importance of a single hero in determining the entire course of a nation's history. Right. And as we all know, the great man of history theory is a little bit silly.
There are all these other factors involved in starting wars and ending wars and economic crises and regime changes, et cetera. But because fantasy readers are used to a single protagonist being that hero that changes everything for the world, you get to invest all of that symbolism, all of those metaphors, all of those things in a single person, which I got to do with my protagonist, Renee. And what's what fantasy did you grow up reading, what were your fantasy influences?
I mean, the standardless right and Lord of the Rings, I so my dad gave me this paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings, but I was very young and I it was so heavy that I ended up ripping it into chunks so that much lighter for me to read. And I would read it everywhere. So I have this very waterlogged copy of The Return of the King because I used to read it in the bathtub.
So that was a big influence. The Harry Potter books, obviously Pendragon books, Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card was another huge influence. And you'll notice that these are all fantasy novels written by old white men because that was what was available at the time. And I wholeheartedly love them. And I think it doesn't make sense to just cast out your influences.
But, you know, as I got older and I read more widely and more was being published, I, I really came back to fantasy in my 20s and I'd fallen out of love with it for a bit because as I entered high school and started college, I realised there really was nobody in those novels that looked anything like me. And I didn't really feel myself represented by those books.
But then when I was in college, I started reading people like Ken Lou and Anthony Jemison and Melissa Long, and I saw that there was this huge resurgence in or not resurgence, a new golden age, I guess, in the fantasy genre of voices that had not really been published or given a platform before. And that was tremendously exciting and inspirational. And that, I would say, has had more of an influence on my development as a writer.
And do you feel you were kind of writing back in some ways against the old white men who were formative in your childhood reading? Maybe that was at the very back of my mind, but I don't think that writing purely as a response to somebody or as refutation creates very good stories. I think occasionally you get novels that are pitched entirely as some version of some other tropes.
But unless they have something else to drive this story engine or if they unless they have some other source to service their heart, I've always found that those stories that only exist to write back, it's something else to be very unsatisfying. For instance, recently in my in a seminar I took with my advisor in modern Chinese literature, we're reading a piece of satirical fiction that was like very sarcastic retelling of this propaganda Chinese opera from from the 1960s.
And and the the satire just made fun of all the characters, all the troops. It really cut them down, destroyed their nobility, you know, brought them to the lowest and most grotesque and humiliating forms possible. And you could see how that was a a response to the very noble, simple propaganda story that the original opera was. But as a story in and of itself, it it felt very flat and uninteresting to read.
So I've never wanted to just write in response. I think a better description of what I and a lot of other newer fantasy writers are trying to do is to fill in the spaces that that have been left empty for so long. Mm hmm. So if if speaking back is sort of a very secondary concern and for good reason. What are you speaking to, what were sort of the questions that you set out to answer when you wrote this trilogy for yourself, for other people, sort of what were you writing towards?
I think the popular trilogy was trying to make sense of something that felt fundamentally irrational, and what I mean by that is a lot of the greatest cause of 20th century Chinese history feel so extreme that it feels like you could not possibly relate to the people who make those decisions.
Like we learn about things like the Cultural Revolution, about students stoning their teachers to death, about millions of people dying from starvation because of decisions made by party officials at the top. And we learn about this in history classrooms. And we think like, how could this possibly happen? This is insane, right? This is so out of the purview of the normal human experience.
Like normal, rational people could not do these things. And so when I was reading about all this history for the first time, I was really struggling to reconcile myself with the fact that these things did happen. They're not fantasy. They're things that people lived through. The rape of Nanjing is something that, you know, people, survivors who are still alive today lived through. And I want to understand how people could do those things and also how people could survive those things.
So one fundamental question that I've spoken a lot about in interviews is the popular trilogy tries to answer the question of how does somebody come outside and how does somebody go from being like a peasant backwater, nobody to a dictator who is in charge of an entire country and makes decisions that result directly in the deaths of millions? Because I don't think that we can just call him an insane monster and leave it at that.
There is a much more necessary and interesting answer that has to do with a very warped version of a, you know, a doctrine that he really thought would be the salvation of his country. So so that's what happens to Rin's character arc over the trilogy. And did you do you find that your readers realise that you're addressing Chinese history in such an indirect way?
Or do they do you find people getting in touch and saying, how can you even imagine such terrible things that they managed to make those connexions? So I think different readers have engaged with the text on very different levels. You have the kind of reader who really just isn't that familiar with Chinese history, was never taught it in school because the American school system doesn't really like to teach things they don't have to do with directly with America.
And those readers have reached out to me and said, well, thank you for introducing me to this history. I was inspired to go do some reading of my own. I included a reading list for that sort of reader at the end of the paperback edition of the paper. And it's been really cool to see how many people have been brought that history because they recognised what the novels were based on.
But I think there's another type of reader, and I mean specifically Chinese and Chinese diaspora readers who know exactly what the novels are about and can engage with it on a much deeper level because they understand some of the more sophisticated arguments that the novel is making. And I'll put a big spoiler alert warning here for anybody listening who hasn't read the trilogy yet.
But the end of the Burning Guide was confusing and distressing to a lot of readers because they threw the entire trilogy, wanted Rin to win. They were rooting for the underdog, for the revolutionary. They wanted to see her succeed and completely overhaul these colonialist and classist systems that had been in place for so long. But obviously, she doesn't win. She she fails and she feels very badly. And the trilogy ends on an open question of what now is this.
This country is going to be under the thumb of the West for quite a bit longer. So what does a democratic transition then look like? What does this failed revolution? What does the aftermath of this failed revolution look like? So a lot of people didn't like how it ended, but a lot of readers of Chinese dissent understood what I was trying to say with the ending, which was that we we know the version of history where Rin wins and it's the version that we're living with today.
That's the PRC. But I'm trying to ask the question of what if the communists had not succeeded? What if instead we had a regime that was much more similar to the nationalists under Chiang Kai shek? And what if the future of China was more similar to what ended up happening in Taiwan, which was brutal and tragic and bloody and repressive in its own right? But could that have ultimately led to a more democratic, free nation like we see in Taiwan today?
And we don't really know the answer? That's a big glaring counterfactual and we don't know the answer from history. So I certainly wasn't able to come up with the answer for a fantasy novel. But I wanted to leave on that note of complexity, which I think Chinese diaspora readers really resonated with in a way that readers completely unfamiliar with the history might not have understood.
I think, again, without giving too much away the plot of the final novel, there's an increasing sense of impossibility that anything like that could occur in this world under these conditions. I think that fantasy novels or the fantasy genre has a real love affair with revolution and regime changes, but I think that a lot of fantasy novels centre on the the process of the initial revolution without asking difficult questions of what does that regime look like?
What does the first 10 years of of the revolution entail? Who who suffers? Who wins? What is that transition like? What complicates that transition? And actually, one of the few sci fi novels I've read that actually addresses this head-on is Pierce Brown's Dark Age because he wrote an initial trilogy which was about that glorious, violent revolution. And you're rooting for the good guys the whole time you want them to to overthrow this dictatorship.
You want this new republic. And then the next trilogy after that is all about the difficulties of running a republic and how it can very easily become its own worst enemy very quickly. So I wish more fantasy novels would deal with the fact that winning the initial battle doesn't mean that you've you've secured a glorious future. That really reminds me of what George R.R. Martin says about Tolkien and Aragorn saying Tolkien leaves us with our golden was wise and good and he wrote for 100 years.
But Martin says, I want to know what was his tax policy? Did he have a standing army? What did he do about all the orcs, all these little baby orcs massing on his borders? But instead, we have that kind of and everything was lovely, even if there are problems in the shire. And we have a kind of sad ending of a sense of general decline than people passing into the West.
But I think so many fantasy novels of that kind of golden age just stop with the triumph and say, and then they lived happily ever after in some form. Well, I'm glad you brought us back to talking, because the the way that the Lord of the Rings and it's one of my favourite things about those that book or, you know, that trilogy, the retroactive created trilogy, which is, you know, the the great battle is won and everybody goes home, but things aren't OK.
The shire still needs to be dealt with. It's rotten and it's awful. And it's a really good reminder about how the war can end on a macro level. But that doesn't put out all of the little fires, which is also something that I try to address and the drag on the public and the burning God, because at the end of the puppy war, Wren wins the third party war in a very dramatic way.
But that doesn't mean it's over because all of those troops didn't magically disappear or magically go home because there is no home to go to. There's still exist roving bands of Muthoni soldiers who are still terrorising the countryside. And one realises that by destroying their home country, she really hasn't resolved anything at all. They're still there. The violence is still going on. There is still little spots of occupation all over the country.
And the question now is how to deal with that and which which really raises the stakes and raises the difficulty of what peace would look like, because peace is never brought about by a single, glorious victory on a battlefield. Mm hmm. Speaking of the sort of painful emotional realism of these books, one of the things that I enjoyed so much about reading them is the way that you took us through military strategy and described battles with such detail and realism.
And you sort of made all of these decisions make sense in all of their incredible moral complexity and in the sort of sheer number of them write the number of battles that had to be fought. Where does that all come from? Where did where where did you obtain your understanding of military strategy? What was your synagogue just comes from a ton of research, because when I started writing the trilogy, I obviously have absolutely no military background.
I don't have any training in military strategy or military theory. But what I did have access to was really good secondary and primary materials about all of the bloody conflicts of 20th century Chinese history. So there are excellent books. And Hans Vandeven, who ended up being my supervisor at Cambridge, actually worked on a lot of them. There are great books about the second set of Japanese war, which is it's the same thing as World War Two in China.
And there are also great texts that make use of records that have recently been released or recently been.
Scholars have been granted access to that detail on battle by battle, meeting by meeting the Chinese civil war and the first 10 years of communist rule, etc. So the fun part for me was to mine all of this stuff for crucial decisions or crucial battle strategies or tactics that I could turn into the heart of a chapter and then figure out ways to transpose it into a military setting where there aren't instant communications,
there's no radio, there aren't planes, there are no trains, and in transportation is a lot slower. And obviously the weapons are a lot more rudimentary. And to ask with those same strategy still work or if they don't, what modified version of that strategy would work in this fantasy world? So it took a lot of tinkering with I do feel gratified that I've had reviews from people who were in the military or have experience with with military strategy or military history who have said,
oh, I really like that. These novels deal with small scale tactics and battle logistics in a way that other fancy novels don't. But I'm also sure that I got a lot wrong just because I've never been in any of those situations myself. But whatever, I couldn't come up with something. History always came up with something better and my job was just how to present it in a very interesting way to the reader. And can we move on from history now a bit into the more fantastic elements of your world?
And I understand that the the gods, for example, and much of the symbolism comes from traditional Chinese law and legend journey to the West and and other traditional Chinese mythological belief, if we can call it that. Can you say a little bit about that? How do you feel that you you just pull stuff straight from mythology or did you make some radical changes to traditional understandings? Well, a little bit of both.
It was very sympathetic, so you mentioned the journey to the West and the legend of the Monkey King, and that was obviously a very big influence. It doesn't take a lot of squinting to see characters whose names are inspired directly from characters in that text.
But a another text that was actually a larger influence is the function Yanqui or the investiture of the gods, which I sometimes describe as the crazier overlook to younger brother, to the journey to the West, because the drive to the West is is the grand epic that most people, most Western readers are familiar with. There have been lots of adaptations. There have been adaptations, especially into English in Hollywood.
So that's instantly recognisable. But the message to the gods is more chaotic, I think more loosely structured, but far more interesting. The characters are really wild and the whole thing kicks off because the king of a declining dynasty writes a poem about the snail goddess Nula in her temple because he's seen a likeness of her and he can't contain his lust. So he writes out these words and she is understandably furious.
So she sends the the the fox spirits who dug into the guise of a beautiful human made to seduce the king, become one of his concubines, and to influence him and turn him against his best advisers so that the country is is written apart by civil war, and then that that war becomes a story of epic. And there are lots of cool characters and and beasts and and myths and folk tales in between that that all fit loosely together.
But it's a very I don't want to call it silly because they don't want to trivialise it. But it's funny to me because so many characters will just die in a single scene or characters will die and then come back without explanation. And there's not like a really satisfying resolution. It's all just a little wild and difficult to deal with which which is perfect for a trilogy like the popular, which is also big and sprawling and chaotic and difficult to pin down.
So I borrowed a lot of characters from that. And once you start reading a summary of it, you'll see where characters like Jancsi and Sketchy came from. I didn't know that text at all. I must say, though, I'm quite excited to track it down and find that a bit more about it. So did you think that? There were, I guess, the question I wanted to ask about the the fantasy elements, I think in particular the Phoenix, which I found a really kind of terrifying force of madness, in a sense.
Did you feel that you had to make up a set of rules for yourself about how you use the the fantasy elements that those things gods could do and couldn't do? Or did you feel that you would use them to do different things, that different parts of the trilogy?
It was actually more important to me to convey a sense that this magic system really did not have rules, at least rules that could be easily understood because there are some basic rules, such as if you call the gods, then you're only your only two options are madness or death. But I, I a great frustration with a lot of fantasy novels that I have is that the magic system feels too cute and easily organised and easy to learn. And I think Harry Potter is a really good example.
I think that it is never explained how if if you are able to competently point a wand and memorise a lot of Latin vocabulary, how you could possibly be a bad witch or wizard, it just doesn't seem clear like what the difficulty with this magic system is. And there are a lot of other magic systems and I won't name names, but it's just they're so poorly thought through. There are so many rules. They it's all just very neatly packaged so that it feels like in and of itself is science.
And that's fine. There's a place for that sort of magic system. And I actually do like novels where magic is studied to the point of a science and it just becomes another branch of science or physics in that world. But with the magic system in the popular, I wanted something that felt uncontrollable and fundamentally unknowable, because at the end of the day, the characters are playing with divinity and they really don't know what they're doing.
They know in a very basic sense, if you do this, you might be able to achieve this effect. But really, they're grappling with weapons far out of their understanding or controlling. It always ends very badly. And importantly, I wanted to have gods that didn't think or act or behave anything remotely similar to the way that humans do, because I really don't like when gods and fantasy novels are just human like entities that happen to live longer and have more powers.
I think that being truly divine would change completely the way that you deal with people, with things, with concepts like time and future, life, death, etc. So it's repeated over and over again that the gods don't want anything and they don't have agendas the way that humans do. They are just fundamental forces of creation and and they oppose and balance each other. So you have fire which burns and you have the ocean which drowns and suffocates and you have healing and you have rotch.
And they're just they just are what they are. They don't want things that the way humans do. And the characters in the popular trilogy really struggle with this because they keep trying to personify the gods and to understand them in a way that would make them more human life. But that that just doesn't work. And that causes really difficult theological questions.
And for example, when you bring in the Westerners, the experience in the trilogy, they they literally call this magic system chaos because it obeys no known rules and they don't know what to do with it. So I at the end of the day, I just wanted this magic system to be really scary and unknowable and to convey the sense that the characters are playing with a very small bit of fire when there's a raging inferno that they have absolutely no control over.
And and I think it worked, I felt like came across wonderfully because I kept thinking even once the experience had turned up. And I could see that the way the Western religious system operates in such contrast to the kinds of gods that you were describing. But I kept thinking somehow the gods are going to to rescue the situation or rescue Rinne or somehow they're going to make it OK.
If I hadn't realised quite how much I was sort of personally invested in the, I guess the Judeo Christian notion that the gods actually. Care a little bit about humanity at some level, and they're going to pull their chestnuts out of the fire, and I know most mythological systems I'm interested in, the gods are only interested in humans because they want to get sacrifice out to them. They need to be fed by them in some way. But I kept thinking, now it's going to be all right.
Now it's going to be alright, particularly with the with the kind of long march to the sacred mountain. I thought, well, when everyone gets there. And once again, my expectations that this was something I found all the way through your your trilogy, the expectations, I had both of plot and I guess of just being upturned all the time, I thought that was a remarkable achievement, I guess because I picked up the the first book not knowing anything about it at all.
And I began to read it as if it was Harry Potter, a kind of Chinese Harry Potter and or whoever goes to synagogue. And then I began to realise by about the second hour of listening to the audiobook, I was in the wrong genre completely there. Well, that's nice of you to say. I always want to be creating something new.
But also I wanted to say on the subject of gods, I think one easy connexion you can draw between the magic system of the popular and weapons and in the real world is nuclear weapons. And this connexion is very obvious at the end of of the popular, because the destruction of Japan is a direct parallel to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And, um, and and as we know from theorists like Hannah Arendt and so many other people who were writing during the Cold War and afterwards, the introduction of nuclear weapons of atomic bombs has completely changed the calculus of warfare. I think with nuclear weapons, we have really stumbled into something that we have no business messing around with, like destruction on that massive scale, the ability to just erase human lives so instantaneously without even that much thought.
I mean, the literature right on on possible accidents and in ways that so many bombs could be launched at a second notice with with very little back and forth. It's really terrifying. And I wanted to convey that sense of this. This is a power that people really should not have that really should not be messed with in any time that you do mess with.
It can't possibly end well, because I think playing with nuclear weapons is like playing with divinity and it's not something that we should be doing. Mm hmm. Is that why shamanism, is that why you chose that as sort of your your vehicle for magic? Because it allowed this sort of incredible metaphorical scope? I mean, again, back to my very first answer, but the honest answer is that when I was plotting out the trilogy, shamanism just seemed very cool.
A magic system where the characters were calling down gods from the Chinese mythology was exactly the fun sort of thing that I wanted to work with. But obviously, as I kept writing the trilogy, I kept finding New Connexions that I wanted to work with to flesh out the themes that I come up with by then.
Thinking about some of the classic terms for fantasy analysis, that one of the other really striking things about the supernatural is the the way in which Rin starts off, in a world where you make it very clear that people go to the temple kind of out of habit is sort of a social practise. But belief in the gods is nothing like a really profound Christian belief or Jewish belief even.
It's it's a kind of mixture of superstition and custom and practise and the magic in the world, that kind of things. You don't expect these forces to become real and then suddenly you realise they haven't gone away. And there's a kind of intrusion of the magic called upas, as you suggest, by your shamans who don't quite know what they're playing with.
Did you did you think that did you look at some sort of intrusion, fancy models, or did you think at all theoretically about the way that fantasy works, or did it just kind of come naturally from your your reading and understanding? Yeah, well, there I'm playing with an extremely common fantasy trope, which is that magic has disappeared from the land and these powers that once existed and were wielded by great heroes aren't aren't here anymore.
And the world has become more mundane. But there's a dark force arising. And our protagonist is going to be the one who discovers these powers and brings it back to life. And we introduce its magic to the land. And there are so many fantasy novels that use this trope.
But in the popular trilogy, I gave a political reason for the reason as the cause of magic disappearing, which is the Red Emperor who when he took over the country and unified it and turned it into an empire, he hit one of his greatest enemies and fears was shamanism and shamans, and he wanted it eradicated. So he waged a very good propaganda to to undercut these beliefs.
Right. And and it was a literal war, too, because the as like the the law in the text goes, he rounded up the shamans, had them killed, had all of these local orders destroyed so that shamanism wouldn't exist in the empire anymore. So by the time Rinn comes along and the gods have been relegated to little temple rituals and superstitions and things that people do out of habit but they don't really believe in anymore.
But there's there's another good question that I hope that the end of the trilogy brings up, which is maybe the Red Emperor was right and maybe shamanism should have been eradicated, or at least the ways in which shamanism was was practised in Nichiren because and this is a conversation that really nudger have constantly she thinks that shamanism is her birthright and it's a necessary weapon,
especially against the West. And he who has a very different relationship to his God, who didn't become a shaman by choice, thinks that it's one of the most atrocious, terrible things that can happen to a person. And it's something. And he thinks that connexion to the gods should be completely severed and that the spirits are right, that it is a natural, that it's chaotic and it's awful. So I left a lot of these thorny theological questions unanswered.
I mean, the question even of those whose beliefs are correct, the the the Curran's or the experience is, is also not resolved by the end of the burning God, because it's you're led to think during the Dragon Republic that these historians are crazy. Their maker is obviously not real. And their beliefs about the the Naqoura gods are wrong because as we know, the gods do exist.
But then during the burning guide, the historians come up with a weapon that is effective in cutting off Rin's connexion to the Phoenix. So their their belief in science and in this divine architect has given them the weapons defectively counter, the Phoenix. And that's that's really terrifying because it turns everything that she knows about her world. And and I wanted to leave on that open question of we don't know who is gods are real.
We don't know who is ultimately in control of the universe, and we don't know what level of engagement with the gods would ultimately be good for us, because I don't like answering questions. I just like opening them. One sort of theme that's been kind of coming up is that you sort of made these really smart, instinctive decisions when sort of building your fantasy world made choices that you because you wanted to.
But that ended up being incredibly useful in terms of the message that you wanted to offer to your readers. So I suppose my question is, how do you feel like your style and approach sort of changed as you as you wrote, especially sort of across the trilogy? And what was it like to kind of come of age as a writer while you were publishing your first trilogy?
I think about coming of age as a writer a lot, because this trilogy has dominated the years of my life in which I think people change the most and go up the most, I would say it was between the ages of 19 and twenty four that I wrote and published this trilogy and that that spans all of college. Right. That spans the first few years out of college. So I felt like a completely different person at the end of the burning God than than who I was when I started the popular.
And I make it sound like when I started the trilogy and made all these smart and stated decisions that ended up being very good for the rest of the book. But I actually I was really frustrated with the the place that I left my younger self had left my cell phone. Because you're younger, less experienced is the worst possible writing partner. Because when I was 19 and draughting the popular, I thought, oh, cool.
OK, let's let's throw in some references to the red junk opera that now will become important, I'm sure. I don't know what it is, but you know, the version of me that's writing a book, you can figure out the answer to that. And I never did find out an answer to that. It just wasn't something that I was interested in exploring. So I left that unanswered in 19 year old to me was also.
So a lot of people think that the trifecta were planned from the very beginning, that the way that their story ends in the beginning, God is deliberate because it really seems to all come back full circle. And the trifecta as a trio are very good parallels to our main trio, Renee Gitai, and nudger. But that was one of the most difficult parts of writing the Dragon Republic in the beginning.
God, because when I wrote the paperwork, the only thoughts that crossed my mind were I think these three people would be really cool. I don't know what their back story is. I don't really know anything about them aside from their powers. I don't even know what happened 20 years ago when supposedly some tragedy occurred and the trifecta fall from power, like who knows what's going on? Let's just insert this as foreshadowing and let myself answer this in the far future.
So it took me a really long time to write the burning God, not because the writing itself was going slowly, but because I had to think up of an answer, think of an answer to a question I had deliberately opened without having any clue how to close. And that is something that I did not plan on doing again.
So after the popular trilogy has been done for a while and I finished well, I'm actually working on a final spelling and grammar checks for what will be my fifth book today before I send it off to my agent. And I think the experience of writing to standalone following the popular ones have been really fun. It's been really nice to work in a completely different sandbox. And instead of the traps that I built for myself like five years ago.
And I think the thing that's changed most about me as a writer is I'm much more deliberate about theme and structure going in. I think with the popular trilogy, I had these really grand ambitions for really difficult ideas that I just trusted myself to deal with and grapple with later. But Babul, which is the novel set in 1830 Oxford and is about student revolutions and colonialism, was much more deliberate from inception.
So every single detail about the magic system, every single detail about the characters backgrounds, where they come from, how they interact with each other and their ultimate roles, and in what unfolds in X four and five, they're all very symbolically loaded and that was planned from the get go. So I think it's going to feel more assured and polished from the beginning to the end versus the popular, which I think you can really tell while you're reading it. It's an evolving shift.
Boko Haram was a kind of big white board, was it? With everything that's. Were you writing it when you were still in Oxford or was that still. It's a planning stage. So I started at Oxford, I wrote a few scenes in particular, in particular wrote descriptions, scenes, because I have a really hard time talking about details and atmosphere unless I'm physically grounded in a place. So with the popular I took a trip to China and I saw a lot of war memorials.
They climbed mountains. And that all helps with that kind of sense of immediacy in place in terms of the popular. And for Babul, it's an Oxford because I was in Oxford, so it was easy to write about the cobblestones, the red cam and the vaults and Garden Cafe, which did not exist in the 1930s, but which I have made exists in the 18 30s because I just I think it is rude to deprive my characters of those scones. But it wasn't. So I thought that I would have at least a year in Oxford to write it.
But then, you know, March 20, 20 happened and I was stuck in Melbourne, Florida. I'm writing a book about Oxford, which I had just left and missed very much. So actually, a lot of the geographic details and building descriptions come from Google Earth and from 19th century manuals and guides,
visitors guides to tools Oxford. And did you think about Oxford fantasy as you were writing the book, were you thinking about those the kind of Tolkien Lewis traditions of Oxford Fantasy or Pulman Eden, the kind of new a sort of Oxford fantasy? Or did you by going back into a 1930s past? Kind of. Leap ahead of those writers and create something even before Lewis Carroll, I guess that fantasy hadn't become synonymous with Oxford at the time that you're writing about.
Well, I think the magical thing about Oxford is that it means so many different things to so many people. And while I love Philip Pullman's version of Oxford and well, I, of course, went to that pub where talking and Lewis sat together and they and their friends talked about literature and I participated in that fantasy. My version of Oxford, I hope, is really, really different from the magical versions of it that have come before.
And I think uniquely, it's an exploration of Oxford from an outsider's perspective, not just to Oxbridge but but to the U.K. and really to the Western world. And I had a lot of fun writing this because I knew that as an American writing about England and about Oxford in particular, British readers were going to jump on any little slip up I made and say, no, it's not like that. You've got this wrong. But my way around that was to make the protagonist an outsider as well.
So he is born in Canton and he comes to England when he's 10 or so and he comes to Oxford for the first time as a student, twenty, seventeen or eighteen. So all the things that were new to me about Oxford, like the fact that cubby-holes or mailboxes are called pages and all the slang that the students use, I've never heard terms like Michaelmas or Hillary or until I was at Oxford.
All those things are new to the protagonist, Robin as well. So my confusions and my misperceptions and my amusement at the particularities of Oxford, I was able to write in directly into that character's experience of Oxford, which I thought was very clever of me because it gives me an outlet for when insiders say that I've done the wrong. Sometimes they will. We can't when is when this babble coming out, its up in August 20, 22.
OK, well we can't wait for that, but there's hopes of your coming to Oxford for the tokin lecture next year. It's like the the plans are tentative. But right now the the idea is May 20, 22. Well, let's hope we can all cross the Atlantic by then. So thank you very much, Rebecca, for talking to us and look forward to seeing you in Oxford next year with a bit of luck. Thank you. Thanks for having me on. And for these fascinating questions, I had a really good time.