Tor Books, in partnership with Literary Hub, presents Voyage Into Genre! Every other Wednesday, join host Drew Broussard for conversations with Tor authors who talk about their new books, the future, and the future of the genre. Oh, and maybe there will be a few surprises along the way…
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Welcome back, travelers! In keeping with today’s books, I’ve been thinking about making this show with an element of time travel. I start talking to the Tor team in late spring about the authors we want to invite, I sometimes even start reading the books beforehand, and I record these conversations weeks, if not months, before we actually air them.
When I recorded today’s conversation with Suyi Davies Okungbowa (Dreams of the lost ark) and Brenda Peynado (Just agent), I (like I think many others) had a question about the future. I say A Q: There were really a lot of questions about the future, and that’s not to say I don’t still wonder what kind of future we’re going to have, how we can make sure it’s as just and accessible and peaceful and generous and wonderful as we can make it… But I recorded that conversation in mid-July, and now, mid-August, things feel different, look different. Who can say whether they’ll actually end up being different, but it’s a testament to the power of imagination. It’s a testament to the power of embracing the possible rather than sitting back on what we’ve always done.
That, I think, is the great promise of genre fiction, especially in the speculative realms. We can imagine a future we’d like to see, or we can imagine a future that’s a warning. In this episode, we dive into two great examples of both.
Just dream, always,
Drew
Subscribe and download the episode wherever you get your podcasts!
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FROM THE EPISODE:
Brenda Peynado: I like to think of a character as a guitar string or a ukulele string, or choose the string of a stringed instrument. I think the best fiction is when you stretch the strings and you pluck them and you hear the song. That’s the best fiction. It’s a song that doesn’t give you all the answers because you’re not looking at the string and examining it and you’re not pulling the string off the guitar to test it, so to speak. You don’t get all the answers. You just hear the song. And I like when at the end of the book you hear this song that comes out of the tension. And to me, giving all the answers is the effect of just pulling the string completely off and then suddenly there’s no song.
Suyi Davies Okungbowa: Sometimes I read these magical systems and it’s almost like you’re telling me how to make a guitar instead of just singing a song, you know? And I say, no, I don’t want to know how to make a guitar. Nobody wants that! We know that guitars exist! I think that’s enough for the average person, you know? Sometimes I don’t even know the lyrics or the notes that are played. But I know that there’s a timbre that I get, that there’s a quality of sound that I get when this music is created by plucking this string.
And I think the best fiction, or the fiction that has the most impact on people, is the one that best conveys its sonic qualities, even when you’re not entirely sure what the entire lyric of a song is trying to say. You understand what’s being conveyed, you get the communication, and natural communication sort of goes beyond the words when they make sense.
BP: Yes, to take the music metaphor even further –
SDO: That’s a good comparison, Brenda. I love it.
BP: I feel like the songs that get stuck in your head are the ones where you’re like, “Me, who is that? I have that song stuck in my head. What was the next verse? What was the next?” It’s the song that’s not finished and you think, and then there are a lot of people who say, “If you can’t get a song out of your head, just sing it to the end so you can at least get it out of your head.”
And it’s those songs that get stuck halfway through. And I just love, I love the fiction that takes me to a point where I think I’ve heard the whole song and then I put it down and I think, what was that? There’s something, there’s something I can’t let go of. There’s something I haven’t nailed down yet and yet the song is so stuck in my head just feeling like I need to play it again.
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Tor Presents: Voyage into Genre is a co-production with Lit Hub Radio. Hosted by Drew Broussard. Studio engineering and production by Stardust House Creative. Music by Dani Lencioni of Evelyn.
