[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Hi. Hi. Um, so Samantha's already been introduced by Nigel's, but, um, I very rarely get to, uh, go on about how brilliant she is in front of her and really, really embarrass her. So you'll forgive me if I cover some of the same points? Um, Samantha Shannon is the million copy bestselling author of the bonus season series and the Roots of Chaos Cycle. Samantha has burned her way to the top of the charts many, many times.
Twice in this year alone with her, uh, fifth book in the bonus season titled The Dark Mirror, reaching number three in the charts in February. And with her last book, um, The Most Beautiful Among the Burning Flowers, getting to number five in the charts just two weeks ago in September is the most competitive month in the publishing calendar. So that is really such an accolade. To do it twice in a year is a little greedy.
Um, but we won't hold that against you. Samantha's been an author at Bloomsbury for over a decade, and her words have been published in 28 languages. So, uh, that she's pure magic. She's also here as part of a world renowned UK tour. And as Nigel said, she recently met the Queen. Do you? My first question to you, Samantha, do you think that writing from the perspective of Queen so many times has prepared you to put to be on even footing when you did meet Camilla?
Um, I don't think anything could have prepared me for meeting the Queen, mostly because I did not expect it to happen. In fact, we only read myself when I know we were not. That's my house. I mean, she has a lot of houses, but I don't think that's one of them. Um, no, but we had a feeling that something might be happening when a helicopter flew over. So subtle. And I was thinking, nobody's going to be arriving by helicopter other than the Queen.
Um, so that that was a fascinating experience. Um, but, yeah, it was quite strange because I do repeatedly go back to monarchs in my work, and there's a part of me that wanted to interview her about being the Queen. I don't think I will ever be allowed to do that. But what if I say it's research? Well, they let me. I wondered if you had. I wondered if you've been like. So what did it feel like to be exceeded? Yeah, I am.
I am so fascinated by kings and queens, and I think it is interesting that fantasy as a genre has such an intense relationship with monarchy. You know, it does tend to be that stories are often told from the perspective of kings and queens or lords and ladies, um, the High Lords, as George RR Martin would say. I think, uh, I mean, I'd love to hear why you think that is.
Um, I've always tended to think it's a simplification of the power system and maybe particularly within Western systems, quite an easy way to. Yeah, access power, undermine it. Um, and to explain why some people have it and some people don't. Yeah. And I think it's also because fantasy has long had a relationship with history. Um, in fact, we have got to a point where fantasy is often accused of being non historically accurate.
Um, I think that was a really I remember when I was, I was watching Game of Thrones. Um, and I'm sure many of you have also seen Game of Thrones, but there was a particular moment where, um, one of the main characters was sexually assaulted. And I remember there were so many people who were angry about this for various reasons, and I think they had a right to be. But there were so many people, um, who were saying buttons historically accurate. It's just what happened to women back then? Yeah.
And I was like, when what they were tracking when there were ice zombies. Yeah. There was this really fascinating thing where people would accuse fantasy of being anachronistic, for example. And I think that's so interesting. But often the records we have of, you know, important people throughout those times tended to be kings and queens. You didn't often hear the stories of the the peasantry or the ordinary people.
So I think that's often why we end up leaning quite heavily on stories about kings and queens, lords and ladies. But for me, it's often a way to explore, uh, hereditary monarchy I find fascinating, particularly from the perspective of women like the pressure to give birth to an heir. And I also write a lot of stories. Um, I write queer fiction. So what happens if you're a queen who's expected to marry a man in siren? Er. So I find the questions really interesting. I've already gone off pace.
That's right. No. That's brilliant. Um, so just to bring everyone in the room onto the same level. Um, would you give us a quick potted history of sort of the bone season and roots of Chaos cycle, and why they differ in what areas of fantasy they kind of operate within? Sure. Um, so the Bone Season was my debut novel. Actually wrote it while I was at Oxford. Um, I studied at Saint Anne's and I wrote it in my second year. Um, as such, it is a strange combination of fantasy and dystopia.
Um, so I, you know, I loved studying in Oxford. Um, it's, you know, the city of Dreaming spires. Uh, but I was also not in a great mental state while I was at Oxford. I felt extremely out of my depth. I felt quite lonely and homesick. And I ended up with this. Quite a dark vision of the city where the colleges were home to supernatural creatures who were forcing young people to take exams that that would dictate the rest of. Their lives. Admittedly, I made them hot gods, but it's, um.
Yeah. It was. This strange combination came out of a dystopia and a fantasy, and I really enjoyed combining those two genres because one of them is very gritty and realistic, and the other is about escapism. So the bone season, it's a deeply difficult series. To summarise. I've been trying to do it for years, but I generally say it's about a young Irish woman with an extraordinary ability going up against an empire founded by the gods.
It's a retelling of various Greek myths, including Hades and Persephone and Orpheus and Eurydice. Um, and that is a seven book series. I've written five of them so far, and The Roots of Chaos is epic fantasy, so it's more just a single genre. Um, each book is a standalone, um, or it's as much of a standalone as I can make it. Anyway. Um, and that one is I usually pitch it as a feminist reimagining of The Legend of Saint George and the Dragon.
Um, there's more to it than that. It's set in a world where there are two different kinds of magic. Uh, one is the magic of starlight, which comes from the heavens, and one is the magic of fire, which comes from the deep earth. There is a very delicate balance between those two kinds of magic. And if that balance is unsettled, things go terribly wrong in the form of a volcano erupting and fire breathing, dragons emerging, which does not go well for anyone. Um, um, yeah.
It's basically, uh, a huge epic journey where I use it to dwell on various subjects like motherhood, like the, you know, coming of age, like the power of destiny, like lots of big themes. It's it's why I do that. Yeah. I mean, wow. Um, I think the only thing. Well, there's lots of lots of crossover in both of your works, but, um, I think the main one is that your protagonists have quite a bad time.
Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I remember my grandmother, who sadly died in 2019, but she was the biggest fan of the Bowen season. And I remember I got a call from my grandfather one day and he just said, Samantha, your grandmother's terribly upset. And I was like, why? And he was like, oh, something about somebody called Paige. Like, apparently you've been very nasty to her. I was like, yeah, that's pretty much all my books.
You really have justice for Paige. Um, so let's let's sort of bring it back to an obvious one. Um, and this might sort of frame, um, or bring in quite a lot of what we've heard over the last couple of days. Um, but why fantasy as a genre for you? Um, and what does it allow for you in terms of sort of storytelling? Um, and what compelled you to get there? I've just always been very drawn fancy ever since I was a child.
I mean, the stories I read as a child tend to be fantasy. Um, the films I watch were fantasy. I've also been a gamer since I was young, and I feel like gaming is is often fantastical. It just allows you to escape your reality and just for your own story a lot of the time. Um, I like fantasy personally, because I think it is the most versatile of any genre.
You can not only combine it with virtually any other genre, but you can do so much with it by either sticking very close to reality, up to reality, or pulling away from it so you can have fantasy. That's basically our world, just with a very thin glaze of magical realism on top. Or you can go right the way out and just create any world you want in your imagination. Just anything that you can break the laws of physics, you can create magic. You can decide to have a hard or a soft magic system.
There are just so many things you can do with it. Literally, the only limit is your imagination. And I've always found that very, very powerful. So I love being able to write the World of the bone season, which is basically our world. But again, with that glaze of magic over the top, or I can write The Priory of the Orange Tree and I can conjure whatever I like. You know, if I want to write a battle in a valley, I can create a valley. Um, and I love the challenges that both of those represent.
I love the challenge of creating a world and writing its rules myself. I also love researching our world and thinking of ways to twist it in a way that just distorts the mirror of reality just a little bit. So that, for me, is really exciting. It feels like I would never need to leave the genre because why would you? There's so many possibilities attached to it. I hope you never do. I might maybe do a little bit of historical at some point, but I think I will always return to fantasy.
Yeah, I mean, we are. We'll talk later a little bit about what your next big project and sort of new project is going to be. Um, but yeah, I mean, I think particularly in the Bowen season, one of the things that I love is how you have quite a fixed point at which it departs our world. Um, and I always thought, that's quite, quite amazing. And then you swing over to the Roots of Chaos Cycle, which is the creation of completely separate space.
I wonder if both of those are kind of an answer to each other. Um, and if you wrote one because you'd written the other and vice versa, you were able to kind of because you, because you published one and then another and then one and then another. And that's quite unusual. Then people go straight to the end of one and then start a new thing, like, how is that and why is that? Yeah. So it wasn't actually intentional that I was going to be juggling two theories at the same time.
I think it is a good thing that I did it, because I probably would have written the bone season to the end, but because it's a seven book series, I think that there is a risk that your voice can stagnate if you don't push it. So I'm writing in the bone system from one character's perspective, in one voice for many years, and I love that, but I think that it did carry a risk of I think you need to keep pushing yourself, you know?
Otherwise I would have only been able to write in Page's voice at some point. And I think the fact that I had to push myself out of my comfort zone with the roots of chaos was a really good thing, and it's taught me a lot about myself. It's taught me how to be a better writer. The reason that I decided to diverge at the point I did was because.
So every writer, I think, has a book that nearly killed them. And for me, with the song rising, which is the third book in the bone season series, I think I wrote a draft of a book that felt more like connective tissue between two other instalments, rather than a strong instalment itself, and that left me just.
I felt like it took a really long time to repair it in the edits, and because I'm a full time writer, I didn't really have anything to do while it was with my editor for suspiciously long periods of time. Um, so I decided I was finally going to write the Dragon book I'd always wanted to write, and I'd always been fascinated by the legend of George and the Dragon. I was raised in the Church of England, so Saint George was always quite a large figure in my childhood.
Um, and I actually returned to how I used to write as a teenager at that point, because I've always historically written in third person, um, from limited perspectives. And it was quite a surprise when I wrote The Bone Season that Page's voice came out, you know, this really strong first person voice. Um, so I went back to writing third. And I like that the two offer different limits, but also different possibilities. So I love that first person.
You can really dig into one character's voice, you know, and there's that wonderful fact that you're just telling their story in this world, and you're not sure how reliable or unreliable they are. You can just really shape the narrative from their perspective. Whereas in The Roots of Chaos, I have a bit more freedom to move around. So I have like four perspective characters in each book that allows me to show a little bit more of the world.
Um, but yeah, I think it was a good thing that I pushed myself to do both. I think everyone would agree. Um. There's a lot of talk of fantasy as being quite a modern thing when you work in publishing, obviously not when you're in a room such as this one. What we've been hearing, um, so much about kind of the history of it. Um, but I mean, it's one of the some of our earliest storytelling. Um, what does the genre mean to you and what like what do you term fantasy?
Where do you where does it start and what does it stop for you? It's a difficult question because again, there are so many different definitions depending on which subgenre you're working in. And there's also the, the overarching genre that's called speculative fiction. Um, so you could argue that many different genres have elements of fantasy to them. I mean, what's the line between sci fi and fantasy or the line between dystopia and fantasy?
There's a lot of there's a lot of speculative aspects that I think can be put against fantasy, and it's like, how similar are they? Um, I think for me, fantasy is probably anything that technically exists beyond the limits of reality. Um, but then again, that is complicated because sci fi, I feel like, is a beyond the limits of reality.
But it could at some point happen like there's a, you know, it feels like it could be possible at some point with scientific advancement, whereas fantasy, I wonder if it's just something that is inherently impossible. Um, but like I said, it's such a versatile genre. It's very difficult to define. But it is interesting that is considered to be a new genre because it really is.
And I mean, to me, it's the oldest genre, you know, folklore legends, they, they so many of them contain elements of fantasy. It is. And everyone will forgive me for asking that question, but this is just the most chance for me to chat to her. So, um, what from the perspective of a successful, prolific author of over a decade, and I don't want to frame it as like long in the tooth, but with a lot of newcomers into the genre, um, coming up through the charts, you are a mainstay.
How do you see fantasy genre's commercial expansion over the last couple of years, and what do you think's changed, um, beyond rude intrusion into your charts? Um, and what do you think's been gained or lost? Um, I love that you said about being long in the tooth, because one of my friends the other day, who's also an author, turned to me and said, Sam, back in your day, you know, so it's like, how dare you? I say, it's funny because I'm one of the youngest authors in my friend group.
I've been around the old the longest just because I was published so young. Um, it's it's changed a lot in recent years, I would say, um, I'd say the genre has exploded, um, since, I mean, it was it wasn't unpopular when I first arrived in fantasy, um, I was published in 2013, and at the time, we had actually only just got off the dystopian trend that had been the trend of the moment. So sort of 2009, early 20 tens was still all about The Hunger Games, really.
Um, and that was the genre I was also writing in. You know, I like I said, I combine fantasy and dystopia. So it was an interesting time, and I think it actually helped the bone season survive all these years. It still has a very passionate readership following it, and I think that is because it's two genres. So when dystopia started to phase out, it was still fantasy. And now people talk about dystopia coming back. It's I think that versatility has allowed it to survive.
Um, we have like I said, we have seen so much change in the genre. Um, the newest thing is, of course, romantically. Um, and I feel like we're still struggling for a definition of romance to see all of these years after it's it's first appeared, you know. Is it does it have to have the genre conventions of romance, which includes a happy ending or does it not? You know what? How do we define it versus fantasy with romance?
Um, I mean, I write fantasy with romance, but I'm not sure I would define it as romantically. So that's been interesting. I think it's been great to see it bring so many new readers into the genre. It feels like it's opened a door that feels more accessible, perhaps, um, because fantasy can be intimidating for some people, I think, um, not only because the books are often very long like mine, but you have to learn a whole terminology of words.
Um, that's quite a steep learning curve. It's really like you're going into a whole new culture and learning its customs. And I think that I, I also think that people sometimes don't realise there's a learning curve to fantasy, and that can become intimidating. When you open a fantasy book, you're not meant to understand everything. And I think people feel they don't understand it. Therefore, there must be something wrong with them.
And I always want to put a label at the beginning to say, you know, it's okay that you don't understand. It's going to click at some point. But I think that's why sometimes the genre puts people off because they feel lost and it's like it's you'll get you'll get that, don't worry. Um, yeah. And imagination is a bit of a muscle, isn't it? You have to kind of work it.
Exactly. Um, and one note that I often give is actually not to you, but, um, you don't have to explain this always, because it's quite fun letting the reader figure it out. Oh, absolutely. And laying it all out there, it's really unrewarding. Yeah. Um, and it's it's rewarding to push past that not knowing, isn't it? It is. Um, I think a good example is actually a dystopian book. So I love the novel A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess.
I love that when he's he has this slang in the books that I think is loosely based on Russian, and he keeps referring to his head as his Gulliver, and he never explains that. He just keeps referring to his Gulliver hurting. And through context and osmosis, you eventually pick up that he means heads and he never says you know, by the way, Gulliver means head. You just get it after a while. Um, and I love that. It's very fluid.
Worldbuilding. Your first conversation after you read that book is such a weird one with people. Yeah, it's a very strange and puts me in a very weird place. It does? Yeah. Um, so if imagination is a muscle, I think as well. Um, part of the paragraph that Katherine Mundell quoted earlier is Ursula Ursula Le Gwyn also saying imagination is the instrument of ethics. Um, do you agree? And do you think that fantasy is able to address current issues and reality in a way that maybe realism can't?
Oh, absolutely. Um, and you can choose for fantasy to be a mirror, and you can choose how clear or hazy that mirror is. You can dwell quite explicitly on real world issues, I think, but you can also talk about them in a more roundabout way. I think sometimes when you address an issue head on, it can feel a little bit didactic. It can feel as if you're preaching to the reader.
Whereas I think that fantasy allows you the engine to explore issues and dwell on them and just sort of ask, invite the reader to wonder what they think about this. Um, it just by placing it slightly away from the real world, it strips it of a lot of the political implications that we have. And I think it speaks to people. It breaks through that sort of political tribalism that causes people to close their minds to ideas.
Sometimes, um, and sometimes with fantasy. You can be an unintentional oracle with these things, because when you're writing, you don't know what world the book is going to be published into and what context it will be read in. So a day of fall and night, um, is my second Roots of Chaos book. And that book is very much about motherhood, is about bodily autonomy.
Um, when it was released, unlike when I started it, we were in a post Roe versus Wade world, and that was quite shocking for me because I realised that that was the context in which the book was going to be read. Um, similarly, the book is about a pandemic. Um, it was not about Covid 19. Um, it was supposed to be about the Black Death. That was the inspiration. But I realised when it was released that no one was going to be able to read it outside the context of the pandemic.
So it is strange that you can write a book years before it gets published, and then you you just don't know what context it's going to be read in politically. Um, but yeah, I think fantasy can be an incredibly powerful tool for that. And, you know, some fancy authors are quite explicit. Um, sometimes you do have the freedom to use anachronisms if you want, um, because again, the genre allows for that.
So I just read an extraordinary book called The Island The Silver Sea by Tasha Suri, which is about nation building and the power of stories. And she even though it's a quite Elizabethan inspired setting, she uses words like queer and trans, and it it does dwell on modern issues about queer and trans rights.
Um, and I think that was really interesting, um, because you also have fantasy that would perhaps make up a word as an alternative, but it does give you the flexibility to decide, like how closely you want to stick to reality. God, how brilliant to put lace on these issues. Yeah, I think, um, yeah. That's fantastic. Um, I guess, yeah. Talking about, you know, the possibilities for it. And I think we do talk a lot about how fantasy is limitless by its nature.
Um, in terms of what it can allow for in creation and expression. Um, what are the limitations, though, um, of working in the genre? Are there any what do you feel as a limit? Um, I think for me personally, there has to be enough of a limit to establish the stakes of the world.
And in order to create a sense of parallel to the characters, you have to have limits on what the magic can do, because otherwise you could have a character fall off a cliff, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, there's a new kind of magic that makes you grow wings when you fall off a cliff. However, you had never previously established that, um, and that's where you have to decide on the rules of your magic system.
Um, you can have a, you know, a relatively soft magic system, I think, but I think it is good to establish some rules of this world. And if you break the rules, I think there should be some kind of reason why it shouldn't just feel like a dose ex machina where any anything can happen, because then you know that the characters are never in true danger. Um, so I think that for me is the limit. Um, I do like to build my worlds with care as well.
I like to think that they feel realistic. Um, the way I do that is to ask myself questions. So I imagine the questions that readers might ask about the world. If you were a particularly insightful reader and I force myself to answer those questions. Um, so I just make a long list of them. I think, you know, if if we have a country where it's a desert country, you know, how are the people accessing clean water, for example?
That's the kind of question I would ask myself. Does it always appear in the text? No, but I like knowing the icebergs so that I can show the tip of it. I guess as an author of long series or as an author of multiple books within a kind of world or a history is how do you manage that with the limitations that you establish on yourself? Do you constantly curse? Samantha with two books ago. Um, sometimes, yes.
Um, it's I think for me, I really like writing long series, and I think that it's the fact that I'm able to write a seven book series with the bonuses. Season feels like such an enormous privilege, because that is not handed to a lot of authors. It's mostly tends to be, uh, dualities or trilogies or even standalones nowadays. Um, and I think that there are so many wonderful possibilities with long series. It's just getting to stick with that same cast of characters on a really long journey.
Um, not only can I show more of the world that I've created, but I can also have my character go through a lot more forward progress, followed by a regression, followed by progress. It's like, you know, two steps forward, three steps back. Uh, with Paige, my main character, you know, she's she has the ability to grow, but then she does make mistakes and backslide sometimes. And I just really like being able to sit with that character for such a long time.
Like, it's just it's been such an extraordinary part of writing the Bowen season. I think that's something people really love about fantasy is the longevity of the character stories, and that's in gaming, but also in comics, um, and also in cinema. Um, we take trilogies for granted, but I think some other genres would kill for them. Oh, absolutely. Um, and I think, um, the ability that you get to really dig into a character, um, as well as well, it's obviously it's amazing.
Um, you're so good at that. And poor Paige for what you put her through. Um, so when you are building world, what does come first? It's tricky because it's can sometimes depend on the book. So with Roots of Chaos, it was fundamentally the legend of George and the Dragon came first. Um, and then I started to research that legend, and I became more and more intrigued by the layers to it.
And I kept finding little details in the legend about, for example, there's one version in which Saint George fights the dragon underneath an enchanted orange tree. Um, so the more details I was plucking, the more story I was coming up with. But it fundamentally started with that story because it is a retelling. Um, and then when I start building, I tend to do what I might call sketch worldbuilding first. So just worldbuilding with, like, a very light pencil.
Um, I have to know just enough of the structure, whether that's like the political structure or the social structure, the magic structure, to put my character into that world. And then I allowed the character to act as an engine of the world building. So as they're walking down the street, I'm thinking about things they're seeing on the street, and I'm asking myself questions about that. What kind of music are they hearing? What kind of food are the street vendors selling?
Is there a preacher on the street? What religion is that person from? Um, what kind of people are they saying around them? What are they wearing? So I the character shapes the direction of my worldbuilding in my research, because otherwise you would just get stuck in a research pit forever, I think. I think there's a huge risk of that. Sometimes people say to me, you know, did you do as much worldbuilding as Tolkien before he started the Lord of the rings?
I was like, no, absolutely no. You know, he was a very intense world builder, and I think that's great. But for me, I would just end up writing an encyclopaedia about the world before I did about the story. So I just had to jump in at some point. I mean, you're amazing researcher and also an amazing writer of food. I think I put on so much weight while editing this book. Um, but you I mean, you travel quite famously, particularly for the Bowen season.
Um, but also for the roots of chaos cycling as well. Um, and, um, I guess my next question was, you know, there's this misconception that fantasy not in this room, but that it's easy, um, and that you can just make it up. Um, you've kind of answered it, but research plays a big role for you. How about travel? How do you navigate travel as a way of accessing research? How do you go about it? Yeah, I mean, travel is again a privilege.
And I know that not every author can afford to travel like I do. So I'm certainly not saying that you can't rely purely on your imagination or indeed on Google Maps, which is the most helpful invention of the last ten years, as far as I'm concerned. Um, I do like to travel, um, for both series, um, with slightly different intentions. So with the Roots of Chaos series, each of the countries in the world is loosely based on a real one.
So where possible, I wanted to go to some of those countries, especially the ones that were going to be the most prominent in the books, just to catch small details, like when I was in Japan, which was the influence that the inspiration for psyche. Um, I remember I was walking down the street and I heard what I thought was a baby's cry. I turned around and there was no one there.
It was a completely empty street, but this bird fluttered past me, and in my mind I combined that into a bird with a baby's cry. And I created this whole mythology behind that bird. And in the world of the Priory. So sometimes I just pick up. On small details like that. Um, and then with the bone season, I, I feel like I often have to do in-person research because I'm writing about cities that people actually live in.
So if Paige, the main character, makes a wrong turn, somebody is going to know it and they're going to tell me about it. Um, and I'm very dedicated to my research. Um, so I will often do slightly absurd things to try to get the maximum detail possible. Um, for example, um, the dark mirror was set in Italy. Um, and there's a scene on the island of Capri. And the famously the biggest landmark on Capri is the Blue Grotto.
And I was absolutely determined I had to go to the Blue Grotto because there was a whole scene in there. And I went there and they said, the tide is too high and is closed today. And I had one night on that island, and I was not paying for any more, because Capri is incredibly expensive. Um, so to feel like I hadn't missed out on the opportunity, I decided that I was going to jump into the sea. The story stresses me out every time I hear it. And I did not have a costume.
I jumped in fully clothed, um, swam to the opening of the cave, and at this point my survival instinct kicked in and I thought, don't go in because you will drown. And like, I just, I just really had to look at the entrance of the cave. So I felt like I'd got something from this trip, and I was like, well, it it looks very much like the entrance of a cave.
Um, and then I swam away and I had to spend the whole rest of the day on Capri, soaked to my skin with people staring at me, asking if I'd fallen in. Um. And I couldn't bring myself to answer, so I just said yes, I fell in. Um, but yeah, that's the kind of research I do. It's it's a little unhinged. You have a quite rich fascination with caves, actually. I do, I do, um, I love a cave quite a lot.
Yeah. Um. So claustrophobic. Sometimes when you're talking to me about things that have interested you, I think particularly deaths within caves. Yeah. Anything that lives within your mind in a way that I think is unusual and quite brilliant. Yeah. There are quite a lot of caves in A day for the night because, um, it's basically a story about a war between dragons and humans and the way, the way I thought humans would probably respond to that was by hiding in caves.
Because how else do you fight a fire breathing dragon except by going to hide in a corner somewhere? So I, I really obsessed over caves for about a year, and then I obsessed over mountains. That was fun. Um, I did not climb Everest. Um, because I can't do that. But I wanted to in my mind as Google Maps for that. There is. Yeah. And YouTube is. That can be very helpful sometimes. Sometimes. Um, so I mean, talking of caves, this is a bit of a loose.
What a segue way. Here we go. Segway. But the Greeks, um, they they probably had caves because, you know, there's, you know, there's, uh, the philosophy of what what are you turning to for your next project, Samantha?
What's next? Um, after fantasy? Um, well, currently I'm finishing the sixth Bowen season book, um, which is very it's kind of exciting and scary because I've been working on this series since I was 19, and I'm turning 34 this year, so not knowing I'm on the penultimate book is terrifying, actually. Um, but also thrilling because I finally get to reveal some of the big secrets I've been working on for a decade.
Uh, the next thing I'm doing up to that is a book about the Greek goddess Iris, uh, which I'm excited about. I'm a little intimidated because there are so many great books that are reimagining the stories of Greek goddesses at the moment, and I'm aware that I'm stepping onto the shoulders of giants. Um, but for me, I wanted to pick a very minor goddess. Um, so Iris, uh, is the personification of the rainbow in Greek mythology, and she's also the messenger to the Olympian gods.
And I felt pretty confident that nobody else was going to write a book about her. In fact, when I say Iris, a lot of people like who? Um. But that for me was the great challenge of it, because Iris does not have she she has stories scattered across mythology, but she doesn't really have a unique body of mythology that is hers. And she also does not appear to have had a dedicated cult in ancient Greece. Um, even Homer, you know, between the Iliad and the Odyssey, he replaces Iris.
You know, he just he literally just doesn't really mention her. Um, and I was I was fascinated by her. So I wanted to take on the challenge of weaving together the fragments of mythology from across Greek and Roman times and create one book about her. I think that's a really nice note to end on, because I think one of the things that we've heard a lot about today is how particularly Tolkin would write in the gaps.
Yes. Um, and how, you know, those gaps and those absences can be quite creative spaces. Um, and I think in that sense, you're sort of stepping into quite a, quite you continuing to step into quite a grand tradition, um, in the sense of answering back to the canon and sort of moving into the future. Absolutely. Oh. So excited. Um, I want to make sure that there is question. There is time for questions from the audience. Um, so, uh, firstly, thank you.
Samantha. So. Hi. Hi. Something I really love about racing chaos is the way in which the myths and legends are talked to about different cultures, and how they're different tales about the history of the civilisations. And so this is like my own writing a lot. So how do you go about creating work very even between those cultures in a way that inspired them? Yeah, I've always found it really interesting.
Um, for example, with the Abrahamic religions that they share, you know, they're very different religions, but they share similar origins. So that was one of my inspirations for that. I love the idea that multiple religions could have sprung from one story and the different interpretations around that. So that was yeah, I just I thought that would be fascinating, particularly in the context of Saint George and the Dragon, which is what I'm tackling in The Priory of the Orange Tree. Um, that one.
I was inspired by the fact that the version of Saint George that I had learned was actually a very sanitised version of a story that has very deep roots. Um, the basic story I had learned was, you know, Saint George is a brave knight who rescues a princess from a dragon. When I went back into the story, I found it was much, much more layered than that.
Um, so, for example, in the earliest version of the story I found, Saint George agrees to slay the dragon, but only if the population of the city being terrorised by it will convert to Christianity, which I thought was not very heroic of him. And I was like, oh, if what if they hadn't converted to Christianity, would he just have written off and left them in the mouth with the terrible venomous dragon?
Um, so that that fascinated me. And then the more I dug into it, I found that a lot of things from our modern understanding of Saint George. So, for example, um, Saint George's sword, um, is thought to have been called Ascalon. And I asked who name to ask along, and I traced that back to a story from the Elizabethan era. Um, and this author called Richard Johnson had not only named the sword Ascalon, but he had also created the myth of the English Saint George.
Saint George was not English, as far as we know. Um, he was from an area that's analogous with modern day Turkey. But at some point he not only became an English saint, a patron saint of England, but he became, bizarrely, a symbol of white nationalism. And this this figure that people hold up as like an icon of Englishness.
Um, and I thought that was fascinating, that when I traced it back to this one Elizabethan version of the story, um, where the author changed it so that George was of an English nobleman from Coventry, randomly. So Saint George is from Coventry. You heard it here first. Um, and I was really, really intrigued by that. And particularly as I continue reading that story, I realised that the Saint George painted by this author was an extremely horrible person.
Um, the story is absolutely steeped in misogyny and racism, xenophobia, particularly Islamophobia. And it's it's quite shocking that throughout time, that story had been changed to this supposedly Saint George as this figure of tolerance and courage. But it grew from those really corrupt roots. And so I wanted to tackle that in some way in the in the Priory of the Orange Tree.
So I have it so that the Saint George figure, galleon breath, that was actually not a great person, and he stole the credit of slaying the dragon from clearing the princess. Um, but yeah, it was I I'm just so interested in how that story went from something very horrific to something sanitised and held up as a symbol of Englishness and tolerance and all kinds of other things. And I just wanted to try to express that in a fantastical setting.
Uh, a lot of mentioning of, well, that language in China already has kind of you just have to have, um, you know, uh, some sense when you're talking about, um, cultures that are different. Um, I'm sure. And that's partly where the research steps in. So that's the reason I often go to places I want to meet people and see things for myself. Um, I also fundamentally, I just try to focus on the characters as human beings.
You know, I think that I try my best to capture aspects of real world cultures with as much respect as I can. You know, I do historical research. I do modern research. Um, I also do linguistic research. So the names of characters in the books are usually based on older forms of real world languages. So I will I will create those and then I will run that past a speaker of the modern version of the language to check that I've done it justice.
Um, but yeah, fundamentally, even though sometimes my characters are similar to me. So I have characters like Gloria and She'll Tart, who is pretty much modelled on my 16 year old self. Um, and then sometimes the characters are completely dissimilar to me. So I have characters like Nicklas, who is a 64 year old alchemist who's mourning the love of his life. Um, I have to nouveau, who is, uh, a woman in her 50s who's been in a relationship for 30 years and has a child, which I don't.
Um, but fundamentally, I just I try to think of the. First and foremost as human beings. And I think, you know, what are the experiences that has shaped this person? You know, what does this person want and what is preventing them from getting it? I just I try to empathise deeply with these characters, and usually I find I am actually more similar than than I thought in some way.
I feel I always feel very connected to them. Um, so yeah, I mean, I, I hope I've done all of the, this, this reflection of the real world justice. Um, it's not supposed to be a precise mirroring of the world. That's why it's a fantasy novel. The world of the roots of chaos is not ours. You know, it has many things about it that are very different from ours, and it grew from very different circumstances.
Um, but yeah, I certainly try my best to reflect what elements I do take from the real world with as much nuance and respect as I can. Two interconnected quick questions. So it's fun to be us. You. Okay, let's use seven. Um, g, did you plug pretty much everything from the start? Or it kind of unfolded as you promised and then started taking. We lost horizon, as it were. And then, uh, linked to that. Um, I do quite a lot of pizza reading and, uh, in person.
Shandra, um, what I see is same account as becoming a new Bible. Um, really annoys me. Um, um, I wondering what, uh, kind of you have take on the kind of recommended beats of the story, uh, which kind of becomes very predictable.
So, um, that's that's for sure. Um, so in terms of how much I planned, um, quite a lot of it, um, I knew in advance this was going to be a seven book series, and I had to do a certain degree of planning, um, because, I mean, some of my author friends that I know, just so they just go in completely without any knowledge of what's happening. And that terrifies me. I think for a standalone, I might be able to do that, but for a seven book series, I would find that very nerve wracking.
Um, because I need to know all of the secrets that I'm going to reveal in the later books, and I need to know where to plant each seed and where that seed is going to blossom. So I definitely did a lot of work in advance because I was so young when I wrote it. There were some things that I planted that I later decided just weren't really going to work, and that's why I completely rewrote the bone season in 2023.
Um, so I created the author's preferred texts, and I was able to clip some of the seeds that I didn't really want anymore. Um, but I don't rigidly plan every single detail. Um, and like you said about the influence of characters, um, I think it's great when a character actually resists what you originally thought you were going to do with them. I call it the character's quickening when they push back against you for the first time.
And to me, that's the mark of a strong character, because they start to develop a will of their own. And I also think that, you know, if I'd planned, oh, Paige is going to do something in book five, but by the time I got to book five, you know, it's possible that Paige would have grown in a different way to the way I'd anticipated. Um, so, yeah, I like to know the destination, but not necessarily exactly how I'm going to get there.
I think if you don't know the destination, then you're just wandering aimlessly around the map, and that might work. Or it might not. Um, you might stumble upon something that you like, but I prefer to have a landmark in my mind that I'm trying to get to.
Um, particularly in terms of I like to know who the character should be at the end of each instalment, so that I know that I can push her towards that point, but I definitely let Paige dictate how exactly she gets there, and she has strong feelings about it at this point. Um, do you have any thoughts on the second part of the question? I feel like as an editor, maybe, I suppose, um.
Oh, sorry. Oh, my last one. Um, I suppose I think every, every book is really different, and some books will really benefit from that scaffold. But I love the idea of a quickening. I love the idea that you're sort of pregnant with all these characters and stories, and that's the first moment that they make themselves.
And I suppose when a character quickens, um, and it goes against the scaffold, you should be prepared to move away from it if you use it as a, if it's a useful, um, stabiliser for you to get started, then that's great. But it shouldn't end up being a cage that you have to work within. That's how I feel. I think you can tell when that happens. I think that's it. Sorry, everyone. Um, but mostly thank you, Samantha, because that was brilliant. Thanks.