Academic horrors

wants to write something unless she is making a point with it. But this impulse intersects with a strong sense of place before she forms any tangible story ideas, which, she shared, is a recent realisation.

“In being able to travel more this summer than I have at any point in the last few years, I’ve realised how important a sense of place is to my writing—i’ve been to England, Scotland, Poland, and I’m about to go to Italy for a month. There is a richness in seeing new architecture, eating new food, the air smelling different, experiencing different histories and cultures and people,” Rebecca said.

“I started writing The Poppy War when I was in Beijing, speaking Chinese for the first time, walking around ancient temples and learning all this history. Similarly thefirstsparksofbabel wereinspiredduringmy year in Oxford. So, it’s place first and the place is what gives a foundation for the arguments I want to make,” she added.

There is no denying the complexity of this young author’s work, whether the themes, the nuance of their execution, or the characters (never tidily sorted into boxes). And then, there are the magic systems, the foundations upon which her stories unfold. Why fantasy, I wondered.

“I don’t have a very smart answer to this. I used to try to make stuff up, like speculative [fiction] and fabulism let us use magical elements as refracting prisms for issues we want to isolate and expand—and that’s all kind of true. But I just think fantasy is fun, and if you could push the limits of physics, be creative and imagine things that aren’t, and write about those, instead of writing about the world that already exists, why wouldn’t you? It isn’t ‘escapist nonsense’ and I don’t understand the bias against fantasy or other genre fiction in certain literary circles,” she said.

She paused and added, “I just think it’s fun and cool and that’s why I do it!”

Rebecca’s next book, Yellowface, will be out in 2023, and she is already at work on number six.

“It’s an academia horror story—everyone in academia has to constantly ask themselves why it was rational to pursue a life of torture and no job prospects and constant stress. I’m interested in paradoxes of rational choice; how can we make decisions that seem to us in the moment to be completely rational and appropriate and find ourselves in sub-optimal or, indeed, bad outcomes?” Rebecca asked.

She added, “It’s not related to this side of things but [I have also been thinking about] what is a just life? What is flourishing, and how do we think about these questions in terms of the life of a scholar? This is my first time writing a novel in a field I am not even adjacent to [this is her fiancé’s field] so it’s exciting.”