ALIETTE DE BODARD

The French-Vietnamese writer will always have Paris... to destroy

She “nukes” Paris for a living, you know. But only in words. There’s a relief.

Paris isn’t just the city Aliette de Bodard calls home, it’s a city she adores. Although, as she herself concedes, she has a strange way of showing this when it comes to her fiction. “Apparently, my way of writing love letters to cities is to write books where they’re completely nuked and people are fighting to death in the ruins,” she tells SFX. She’s talking about her Dominion Of The Fallen series, a “Gothic dark fantasy” set in an alternate Paris torn apart by “a great magical war”. As portrayed in new novel The House Of Binding Thorns, a standalone sequel to The House Of Shattered Wings, it’s a place of “magical residue clogging the skies”, where the Seine runs black “with the remnants of spells”, and opposing sides, factions of fallen angels, are still fighting “a cold car of intrigues and political backstabbing in the ruins of the city”.

Somehow, it’s no surprise when de Bodard says she’s “fascinated” by war – but there’s an important caveat. “It’s not really combat that I’m interested in,” she says, “but rather, the effect of the war on civilians and its aftermath – the everyday struggle to survive in a ravaged land, the difficult path to lay old grudges to rest, and the slow and painful process of rebuilding something that can never be what the equal of what existed before – something that is both less and more, and wholly new, and still raw and painful.”

after the war

One thing that sets the Dominion Of The Fallen books apart, makes them special, is the richness with which de Bodard describes this post-conflict landscape. “I can see the value of prosaic and to-the-point prose, but that’s never been where my heart is,” she says. As key influences, she cites the “lush and poetic” prose of Patricia A McKillip and Ursula Le Guin, “also poetic but in a deceptively simple way”.

More deeply, the roots of her fascination with war lie in her background, where the near 20-year-long Vietnam conflict “loomed large”. Her father is French, her mother is Vietnamese and de Bodard grew up in “a dual Catholic/ Confucian household”. Her maternal grandmother was a big presence in a young life largely spent in Paris – although de Bodard was born in New York, where her father worked as a financial analyst.

When de Bodard was 15, her father got a job in London. She had grown up with “mythology and fairytales”, but this was her first encounter with the idea of SFF as a distinct genre. Unlike in Paris, where novels were shelved under general literature – “which was great for reading variety, but, when combined with the taste of some collections for abstract cover art and cryptic summaries on the back cover, meant quite a few surprises” – her local library in London had a science fiction and fantasy section.

Soon, the teenage de Bodard was hoovering up novels by David Gemmell and Robin Hobb, and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics. She saved her pocket money to buy Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. “It did wonders for my SFF culture, and also wonders for my level of English, though I bet my rather specialised vocabulary must have puzzled my teachers,” she says. “I could name all the parts of a castle or of a sword, which wasn’t very useful in everyday life…”

But useful in a career as a writer that began when she was studying at one of France’s top engineering colleges, École Polytechnique, where she studied computer science and applied maths, and has taken off in earnest since the ’00s. Already, she’s a multiple Nebula and BSFA Award winner.

do what you know

Throughout her career, she’s often created non-western futures. “One of the things I’ve learnt is that I might as well write the things that I feel strongly about, the books I want to read,” she says. “And one of the things that I missed terribly when growing up, and didn’t realise for quite a while, was characters that looked a little like me.”

Not that, having so often encountered a place called “fake China” in fiction, she thought lightly of trying to put things right by drawing on her Vietnamese heritage. “I was actually terrified of getting Vietnamese culture wrong and getting yelled at by my family – surely it was better to get other cultures wrong and get yelled at by strangers!” she says. “And one day I realised that if I didn’t tell stories based on my cultural background – if I didn’t make a conscious effort to incorporate people like me, values that spoke to me, in my futures – then who would?”

But de Bodard doesn’t want to spend all her time creating such stories. Life is busy. She’s a mother of two young children, “The Librarian” and “The Snakelet”. The former is containing a “Lovecraftian invasion” of plants in the living room by trying to eat them. She still works part-time designing “automated metro systems”. The work, de Bodard says, is “technically challenging, seldom boring, and it involves trains, which are way cool”, and it means she’s not “cooped up at home all day” writing. This, in turn, helps her “think of writing as a hobby and a pleasure rather than as a chore”. Rarely has Paris been destroyed by someone in such good spirits.

The House Of Binding Thorns is published by Gollancz.