The Bear and the Nightingale

"I was actually at a book signing in Boston with Katherine Arden. It was the first time I’d seen her book, and I’m just a sucker for fairy tales . I saw the cover of the book and said to myself, ‘Oh, Russian fairy tales? I’m into this, let’s check it out!’ And I read it, and it was absolutely delightful. The book is set in a Russia that is still under the yoke of various other powers and has not fully established itself yet – a Russia before Peter the Great. It’s very much in a more Eastern world, and it is filled with aspects of Russian folklore and Slavic fairy tales – which are interwoven among all of these other things that are going on at the time, where Russia is trying to assert its independence from other Central Asian powers. It follows Vasya, a young woman from the countryside, who becomes embroiled in various forces that are taking shape in this early Russian society. She finds herself at the heart of it as the trilogy goes on. I liked the story because it was so heavily magical. There are spirits of a type, folklore beings that represent the winter and the summer and night – but they also are tied into so much of the politics. You have everything from the domovoy , the little helpers in the kitchens, all the way up to the much more powerful beings within folklore. I thought that was really well done. Yeah, I think what’s interesting about the Winternight trilogy. It gives us the history of Russia that we already know, and then it throws in Russian and Slavic folklore. The way it does this, it speaks to how someone in the time period may perhaps have viewed their reality – where this folklore was not something that was considered ‘folklore’, but was part of the natural world. The supernatural and natural world here remain blurred. You also have the coming of Christianity, which is taking away from that world, and there’s a competition. I thought it was fascinating to set it during this time period, where you’re going to have competing forces; where that old world feels as if it’s falling away, but people still remember it, and it’s trying to assert itself within this changing society. A Master of Djinn grew out of a short story I’d written called ‘ A Dead Djinn in Cairo ,’ which itself came out of my time in grad school – somewhere between showing Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers and reading Edward Saïd, and looking at the anti-colonial era. I was thinking about the power of the Maxim gun in creating colonialism around the world, and I was teaching this as a grad student. Somewhere along the way, I guess the science fiction part of me thought, ‘Well, what would stop a Maxim gun? Oh – magic.’ I was looking for a place to set it, and I actually had several… Cairo ended up being the place, because like you said it’s a crossroads of places – from the Near East, the Mediterranean, and other parts of Africa. And it’s an ancient city. It’s great when you’ve decided where to set a story, then you get to dig into the history – and sometimes it’s more history than you can ever use! I think so many times when people do write speculative fiction about Egypt, they go immediately back to ancient Egypt – as if that’s where Egypt begins and ends. I still draw on aspects of ancient Egypt, but I really wanted to focus on other aspects of the culture that come after, that still exist. So, I created a 1912 alternate Cairo – a Cairo that we are kind of familiar with, where we know some of these histories, and some of the political power players involved. But djinn have made themselves much more known in the world. They’re not just something that people may say, ‘Oh, that cat might a be a djinn.’ They’re walking around, they have jobs – some are lawyers, or architects, and what have you. Magic itself has returned, and altered this Cairo, made it this phenomenal power with a lot of steampunk technology. It’s also altered the shape of the world and dynamics of power. Like in our history, you have a Berlin Conference in the late nineteenth century to decide what to do with the scramble for Africa. But in this alternate telling, this is because there’s magic in Cairo! European powers need to figure out how to stop that! It was interesting to pull on some of those things I knew from history and then imagine with magic. What happens then? How does it keep some of the similar trajectory of our world, and yet alter it at the same time? And how do humans react to these other beings that are going to now compete with us and live alongside us? That’s why I created the Ministry. I figured, if something like that did happen, the first thing people would do is create a bureaucracy, a ministry to try to figure out how to tamp it all down, or at least keep it in check. And the books show that as a work in progress."