Waistcoats, Weaponry, and Writing: An Interview with Gail Carriger

Author Gail Carriger writes comedic steampunk mixed with urbane fantasy. Her Parasol Protectorate books, their manga adaptations, and the first two books in her YA Finishing School seriesabout Victorian girl spies were all New York Times bestsellers. Her newest book, Waistcoats & Weaponry, is out November 4th. She was once a professional archaeologist and is overly fond of tea.
Gail was kind enough to answer some questions about her latest novel and writing in general. So pour yourself some tea, button that waistcoat, and let’s get started!

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Rachel Cordasco: Waistcoats & Weaponry is the third book in your young adult steampunk Finishing School series: can you give us an overview of this latest installment and explain how it fits into the series as a whole?

Gail Carriger: In this book Sophronia and her friends finally get to spend time away from their school, putting all their newly leaned spy skills to good use. There is a train heist, an accidental kidnapping, a renewal of old acquaintances ­(not all of them welcome) and, finally, some serious flirting. Also, I suspect someone throws food at someone else ­– in my books, they usually do.

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The SEA is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia, ed. by Jayme Goh and Joyce Chng (Rosarium Publishing, 270 pages, 2015)


If you haven’t already, I encourage you to read my interview with editors Jaymee Goh and Joyce Chng on the genesis of this collection. As they explained, The SEA is Ours is a unique and exciting effort to broaden the boundaries of the subgenre we know as “steampunk” while simultaneously creating alternate colonial histories, ones that imagine people using airships and automatons (among other things) to beat back invaders and keep alive traditions in an evolving world.

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[This is an excerpt from my review on SF Signal 7/7/15. Read the entire review here.] 
 

Aurora is the first of Robinson’s books that I’ve read, and now it certainly won’t be the last. I started the novel knowing that it had something to do with space travel on a generation ship, and the search for other habitable planets, but I never expected such an in-depth, detailed, and downright vast exploration of the implications of human space travel and relocation.

Some of you, I assume, will think about Battlestar Galactica, The Martian Chronicles, Severance, and the like while reading Aurora, and rightly so, since stories of humans setting out to find a new home run throughout American sci-fi. What makes Aurora stand out, though, is just how far Robinson takes the narrative: dropping us into the generation ship as it approaches Tau Ceti, following the small group of settlers who test out the chosen moon, then returning with the ship and its remaining passengers (in stasis) to Earth, and finally following the surviving passengers as they set foot on a planet they’ve never seen but nonetheless call “home.”

[...]

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[This is an excerpt from my review on SF Signal 4/22/15. Read the entire review here.] 


Most novels (including works of speculative fiction) are written by a single author who creates a narrator(s) to tell a particular story. It’s usually as straightforward as that.

The Doors You Mark Are Your Own, though, is not like most novels.

Before you can even get to the dystopian, post-apocalyptic story about a city ruled by a corrupt mayor who wages war in order to unite all of the other cities under his leadership, you have to wrap your head around who exactly is telling this story. The cover states that The Doors You Mark Are Your Own was written by Aleksandr Tuvim and translated from “Slovnik” into English by Okla Elliott and Raul Clement. We’re even given a “Note on the Translation” by Elliott and Clement, as well as a prologue about why this book (the first of a trilogy) was written in the first place.

Thing is, Tuvim himself is a fictional character. Elliott and Clement didn’t really translate this text- they wrote the entire thing. Now, some readers/reviewers may pass over this point, or refer to it simply as an interesting oddity, but I see it as an integral part of the story itself.

[...]

Review: Red Girls: The Legend of the Akakuchibas by Kazuki Sakuraba, translated by Jocelyne Allen

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There are a ton of reasons why you should be excited about/immediately grab a copy of Red Girls (I’ll tell you those reasons below), but what makes Sakuraba’s novel stand out is that it’s the ONLY SFF novel by a woman translated into English this year (at least, that I’ve found). We know that women all over the world are writing SFF, and it’s time more of their books were translated into English.

But back to Red Girls. At just over 450 pages, it is a multi-generational saga, focusing on three women in the Akakuchiba family (the “red” in the title refers to the “Aka” of the family name). Sakuraba links the passing of each generation to Japan’s quickly-changing post-war society, and asks us to consider how each matriarch deals with the expectations and hardships of her particular cultural moment.

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This isn’t your grandfather’s reading experience, and that’s the point. Jacek Dukaj, Poland’s most famous living sci-fi writer, has created a multi-dimensional text that explores what it means to be a human versus a machine with a human consciousness. The Old Axolotl is only being released as an e-book (from Allegro), mostly because it includes layers of hypertext and other digital elements, including diagrams of robots that can be printed on 3D printers. (see the Culture.pl article for more details about the book and Dukaj’s intentions). Dukaj is interested not just in telling a story about human extermination and the rise of robots, but also in how the digital experience is shaping us as humans and how we will read in the future.

In a recent piece that he wrote for the magazine Książki, Dukaj argued that “[t]o read an e-book when everyday one is surrounded by [a] million virtual distractions, is like walking on a tightrope suspended over an abyss during a thunderstorm.” (“Bibliomachia”). We are constantly bombarded with images and information, but what happens when humans have disappeared and only the technology remains?

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The Just City by Jo Walton (Tor Books, 369 pages, 2015)


I admit that I usually don’t choose to read novels classified as “fantasy” (preferring hard-scifi or space-opera), but when I saw the description of Walton’s latest, I HAD. TO. READ. IT. After all, it includes all of the following: time-travel, Greek gods, Sokrates, an experimental community (makes me think of Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance), and robots. As I said to everyone to whom I recommended The Just City, it only lacked dinosaurs. Sokrates riding a dinosaur- that would really be something.

But I digress. The Just City is unabashedly ambitious and experimental in its own right, as Walton imagines what would happen if devotees of the goddess Athene were gathered up across the centuries and placed on a (volcanic) island to set up Plato’s idea of the “Just City,” as described in his Republic. The goal of the inhabitants would be to “become [their] best selves…[to] learn and grow and strive to be excellent.” Later in the story, Simmea, one of the main characters, starts re-examining that goal, to which Pytheas/Apollo explains:

Plato wants perfect justice, in a city or in a soul. In a practical way what they want to produce is philosopher kings: people who truly understand the Truth, and agree on what it is, and pursue it and keep the city in pursuit of it.

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