Samantha Shannon’s new novel A Day of Fallen Night is out today from Bloomsbury, the second book in her new cycle The Roots of Chaos which began with The Priory of the Orange Tree. This year marks the 10th anniversary of the publication of her first novel, The Bone Season, and her first interview with Sci-Fi Bulletin (which you can read here). She chatted with Paul Simpson a couple of weeks ago about the two series, and her next project…

 

It’s ten years since we did our first interview, which was a couple of weeks before The Bone Season came out. The last decade has been a rollercoaster ride to a large extent for you, hasn’t it?

It really has been a real roller coaster of a decade. Of course I haven’t finished the Bone Season series yet, which was not the original plan. But The Priory of the Orange Tree happened as well, so now I’m in this situation where I’m juggling the two series, which has been challenging but also fun.

Let’s stick with the new cycle for the moment. I don’t want to get into spoilers about the new book because this is going to come out to go with publication and this is not the sort of book that’s going to drop on people’s Kindle and they’ve finished it three hours later.

I think the quickest I’ve seen someone read it is my agent’s son who is also his assistant and reads the manuscripts for him; I think he read A Day of Fallen Night in about a day, twelve hours or something. It was quite incredible. But yes, it’s not a book that’s designed to be read quickly, it’s supposed to be more of a book where you sink in and hopefully savour the journey rather than rushing to get to the destination.

Both of these books have felt to me like they are, to use an analogy, ten episode miniseries on HBO, as opposed to The Bone Season books which are movies: you had a beginning, a middle and an end with some things that went on, whereas with this, there’s very much a feel that the world is there and we’re wandering into bits and pieces of it in order to tell the story and to meet the characters that we do. Does that mean you’ve got to have a different way of approaching writing the two different series?

Oh yes, very much so. Like you say, they do feel like a miniseries and I think with The Priory of the Orange Tree, I wanted it to be a standalone and that was primarily because I still had The Bone Season going. I was slightly concerned: I didn’t want to commit to doing two long series at the same time because I knew I’m not the kind of writer where I could have coped with that. But I could take some time away to write a standalone, as it was at the time, and yes, it was a really interesting process deciding what to do with that.

I felt like at the moment a lot of fantasy books are either duologies or trilogies – and I think that’s great – but I was tempted by the idea of just writing a standalone because I think it can be quite nice to readers to have a complete self-contained adventure in one book. It’s actually quite nice to not have to wait to find out what happens next, you can just binge the whole thing. I know that’s certainly how I consume TV: I just binge a whole series in a day – I prefer doing that to waiting.

It does involve very different levels of planning. With The Bone Season I have to be constantly thinking about what’s going to be happening in the future books as well as the current book, whereas The Priory was originally designed as a standalone so I didn’t have to think so much about that, it was just all the issues and the mysteries could be solved over the course of the book.

When I decided to write A Day of Fallen Night and extend the cycle, I decided to broaden the background of the world, so there are things that happen in A Day of Fallen Night that you’re not supposed to fully understand because I’m hoping to resolve them in a different book in a prequel that goes back even further. Specifically, why is the magic system out of control? The world of Priory is based on a delicate balance between two branches of magic: one is the fire magic from the core of the world and the other is the star magic from the comet. There’s a reason that’s gone out of balance and that reason hasn’t been revealed yet. But I hope that won’t affect readers’ enjoyment of them as standalone adventures.

That’s the point about any well created world building: we as the reader don’t need all the answers, we just need to be sure that you know them.

Yes and I do.

And if you don’t know them, then we’re all screwed, basically.

Yes. I’ve heard some authors who are pantsers, as they call it, where they can just think on the spot about things. I suppose I am trying to do that a little bit at the moment with my fifth Bone Season book: there’s so many different directions I could have taken the series at this point that I’m having to slightly allow myself to be a little bit of a pantser –but with a very long series you do have to also be a rigorous planner, even if you then kind of improvise some bits. It’s definitely something you have to plan a lot because you’re planting little seeds that are going to grow later.

The new Bone Season book is the fifth still of seven?

Yes, seven.

So it’s your antepenultimate novel – which presumably does mean that you must be setting certain stuff up for the finale, if the intention is that the finale resolves, pretty much everything.

Yes, that’s the idea. I think it would be a bit frustrating to wait however many years it is going to be before I finish and then not have everything resolved. I think it’s OK to leave some mystery at the end of the book, I don’t think every single element of the world-building has to be resolved or explained, but pretty much everything I had planted I have tried to make bloom by the end.

With both Bone Season and this new cycle, have you hit that irritating moment where you go ‘Why in the name of everything did I write that X number of years ago?’ when you realise you’ve written yourself into a corner. Is there anything you can actually specifically mention that you would have done differently had

Yes, that has been a really interesting thing with The Bone Season. Actually I’m editing the first book now – because it’s the tenth anniversary, Bloomsbury has allowed me to do an anniversary edition.

It’s been a really interesting process because, originally, I thought I was going to do quite a light edit on it but I’ve ended up just butchering it, completely eviscerated so many elements of it, without trying to change the canon too much. But there were a couple of things I found in there.

The problem is, is that whether it’s a pilot episode of a TV show, the first instalment in a series, anything like that, the creator is trying to figure their own way through it as well. I actually read about this on Tvtropes: it’s something like ‘First Episode Weirdness’ and it’s where you can see that the pilot or the first book is kind of weird because the author is still trying to figure out what they are doing. I can see that in The Bone Season. I was coming across little tiny loose ends and I was like, ‘Oh, I see what you were thinking there, you thought you might want to do something with that later but then you changed your mind because you realised it was just overly complicated.’ I’ve actually gone through and just slightly smoothed out some of those loose ends in the anniversary edition.

There were a couple of things that I was just like, ‘Oh God, why did you feel it was necessary to do that?’ but it was just obviously me playing with ideas. There was so much potential to the world of The Bone Season that I was just pulling at every thread I saw.

It has been a really interesting process. A specific example: there’s a bit where my character gets handed a photo that has a certain date on it and I do remember what I was going to do with that but then the actual process of bringing it up again and explaining it would just be so cumbersome because it’s such a tiny tiny thing, I was like ‘You know what, it just doesn’t matter.’ There are certain places where I have to let it go but I was really young – I was nineteen when I wrote The Bone Season!

Going back and re-reading that first interview that we did, one of the things that struck me is how much you said you’d been living with the story of Paige for X number of years up till then and juggling university and everything, so it’s not too surprising that you’re finding things. It doesn’t sound like it’s quite the same as Stephen King with The Dark Tower where basically, he retconned elements. The Gunslinger version one and The Gunslinger that’s out there now feel two very very different books.

Oh good, I feel better now.

I think that it was definitely a radical approach I took with this anniversary edition. Bloomsbury have just issued the new blurb for it and they’ve presented it as ‘The lushly reimagined version of The Bone Season.’ I thought that was such a good way to describe it because it is essentially the same story, I just wanted to write it with the skill I’ve, hopefully, acquired in the last ten years.

So if somebody comes to the series now, do they read the new version or do they read the original?

The new version, please.

It’s coming out in August and I’m in a situation where obviously you don’t want to discourage readers from buying your own book – certainly your publisher would not be thrilled with that – but I keep wanting to say ‘Look, read it if you want but please then please read the better version I’ve got here.’ It’s available for pre-order.

On a more fundamental level with that, you’ve got ten years’ experience, and 3 and a half to 4 million words in print since then. How much do you want to re-think it, because the way that Samantha of 2023 is and thinks, is not that way that Samantha of 2013 was and thought.

No.

Not just in terms of what you’ve been through in your own life but the way the world is, Covid, everything like that. Have you fundamentally gone back to it to change ways of phrasing that you wouldn’t do now, or are you still respecting the person you were in 2013 in order to tell that story? Because presumably if you started from scratch now, you wouldn’t do it the same at all.

You’re right. I think the way I’ve respected my younger self – and I do respect that she worked very hard – is that I’ve stuck largely to the same plot. There’s a couple of moments where I’ve either trimmed or changed a scene a little bit but it does fundamentally follow the same sequence of events. That’s how I’ve respected my younger self but I have really changed a lot of the writing because the old one is still out there and people are always going to have that on their shelves, hopefully. It’s not entirely leaving the old world behind.

It was weird, because I was approaching it more from an editorial perspective. I just couldn’t leave it alone. If I saw a sentence I didn’t like I just thought, ‘No, I can do it better this time.’ It’s frustrating having a long series, where the first one, the opening instalment, is represented by a book I wrote when I was very young. I think The Mask Falling, the fourth book, is the best book I’ve written, personally, including The Priory books. I love it – but to get there, you have to go through The Bone Season.

I still love The Bone Season. I think for a nineteen year old student, I think I did a good job with that. But I think the problem was that the size of the world, the ambition of it, outstripped my ability at the time. I’ve been writing as a hobby since I was 12 but I knew that if I wrote The Bone Season now, I would do the concept so much more justice. If I wasn’t still writing the series I might have just let it go and I might have just thought  ‘Well, it was a standalone I wrote when I was 19, there’s nothing I can do about it.’ But I really love and believe in this series and I really want the first instalment to be the best thing I could write, not the worst of my books. So that was why I decided to rework it and I’ve been very lucky that Bloomsbury’s just let me do that.

Would you want to do that with any of the others in the series or is it just The Bone Season that you would work on?

It’s just The Bone Season that I would be doing an extensive edit on. I would like to do a couple of small tweaks to The Mime Order and The Song Rising, just to bring them in line with The Bone Season because I’ve made a couple of changes that I think would require a couple of tweaking of sentences in the other books but definitely not to the same extent that I’ve edited The Bone Season.

For The Mime Order, the second book, I was not at university at that time, I’d already graduated, I was already in a much better place mentally, so I think the writing in that is still very strong. I’m still quite proud of that because I am not someone who gravitates naturally towards writing a murder mystery but I somehow managed to do it. I think that’s actually fine as it is. I just asked Bloomsbury if I can do some very light tweaking on those two and again, they said yes. They’ve been really onboard with me doing all this which I really appreciate.

There will be fans out there, I’m sure, who have done their encyclopaedias online going ‘Damn her, she’s done this.’

(Laughs) Again, I’ve left most of the fundamental stuff where it is. They’ll probably say ‘Hmm, I wonder why she got rid of that mysterious sentence about a photograph with a date on it that never came up again?’ But there’s also a couple of other points, as well as my abilities as a writer.

I think my understanding of feminism has grown significantly since I was nineteen and there were a few things in the first book reading it in my thirties that I was like ‘Hmm, that’s not as romantic’ as I thought in my head when I was nineteen. I think I had quite a different idea of what was romantic and I think I’d absorbed quite a lot of problematic ideas in that sense. It upset me to see it because the main love interest, Warden, is such a gentle character in my head and he’s the character that’s been in my head the longest that I’m writing. He’s been in my head since I was fifteen, so that’s a really long time – I’m thirty one now. I can’t remember my head without Warden in it but I felt like the first book just didn’t do his character justice because of those slightly odd ideas I’d absorbed as to what was romantic, so I’m really glad I got to address that. It felt like I was making him more like the character I know he is.

Going back to the other cycle, what made you do the prequel? Was there just an unanswered question in your mind?

Yes, pretty much.

I remember when I told my agent that I was writing The Priory of the Orange Tree I said ‘It’s going to be a standalone,’ And he gave me this look and said ‘Is it though?’ I was like, ‘Yes, I don’t have time to write another massive series.’ But he said, ‘No I know you, you’re the person whose debut was the start of a seven book series.’ He knew that I had a big imagination and that I would be very unlikely to be able to leave it.

I had to develop quite a significant world and history for The Priory, so when I was looking at it, there was this particular event in Priory’s history that comes up multiple times throughout the narrative called The Grief of Ages or The Great Sorrow. I looked at that and thought, ‘Oh God, I’m just so tempted to write that.’ It’s interesting: I’m not really drawn to war novels, I can’t stand writing battles. The hardest thing about writing for me is writing battles and I knew this was going to inevitably be some kind of war book.

I also knew that it was going to be tricky from a narrative cliché perspective, because The Grief of Ages was such a catastrophic event, the outcome could not be changed by human action. It was changed by a comet that arrived to calm the magic and it’s not really considered to be a great narrative thing when something just comes out of nowhere.

It is deus ex machina, isn’t it?

It’s deus ex machina, yes. So I knew that I was inevitably going into a book that was going to be concluded by a deus ex machina. I was a little bit worried about that so I was like ‘What are your characters going to do? If they can’t affect the outcome, how is this going to be interesting from an action and tension perspective?’ So I ended up thinking ‘What if this was a book about survival and they have to find out about this comet, they don’t know about it originally and [it’s about] the challenges they’re going to have to survive until the comet arrives.’ I thought I could do that. I’ve hopefully acquired the skill by this point to make that a compelling narrative. I actually was quite drawn to the challenge of it in the end, even though I knew it was going to be hard – but I like pushing myself as a writer from that perspective.

I also had mentioned a character called Glorian who is around during The Grief of Ages and I was very tempted by her character. She was this warrior queen whose legacy very much hangs over The Priory of the Orange Tree. I thought that exploring her would be really interesting, to peel back her legend and to see who the real person was underneath it.

As soon as I started it I immediately felt drawn to the world. I love getting to show the world at an earlier stage as well because it’s set 500 years before Priory. It meant that I had the opportunity to be in the same world but I really had to think of how it would be different because 500 years is a very long time and again, I was very drawn to that as someone who enjoys world building. ‘How do I show the change in this world? How do I plant the seeds of it becoming the world that we eventually see in Priory?’

You’re retro engineering effectively, aren’t you?

Yes. It was interesting. I suppose one of the ways that we mark 21st century attitudes is through progressive attitudes, so for example attitudes towards gay people, as someone who’s gay myself, that’s certainly you notice as attitudes develop towards that, But interestingly in the world of Priory there is no homophobia, so that was not a way that I could particularly demonstrate an improvement of attitudes over time. I essentially had to show difference rather than progression in a way and I had to think of reasons for that. So one of the interesting ways I did that was using religion. I often use that as a source of conflict in the world of Priory and a source of tension and different attitudes growing or shrinking. So in A Day of Fallen Night, it’s quite interesting from a religious perspective because you see the conversion of two countries to the Six Virtues system, which is loosely based on Christianity and my experiences with the Church of England.

Then there are a Northern Viking type people whose indigenous religion is based on ice spirits and faceless gods and they then, because of the marriage of their new king, they’re essentially forcibly converted to the Six Virtues. That was the way I showed a change in attitudes and development because by the time of Priory they have been in that religion for 500 years but at this point they’re still not.

Another way I showed it was actually through this very young republic in the book. Even by the time of Priory, the world is still very much locked in a monarchical way of thinking, hereditary monarchy particularly, and it’s kind of a tragedy during The Grief of Ages because there was a young republic that was starting to build a more progressive democratic way of thinking. You see them threatening the monarchy at the time but then unfortunately during The Grief of Ages, this republic is such a small place that it’s completely flattened, essentially.

You mentioned earlier that there’s a third book in the cycle, so presumably you’ve got to go through exactly the same process to go further back?

I think it will be probably over a longer period of time, that one. Priory took place over a year, Day of Fallen Night takes place over three and a half but this [new] one, it depends which idea I write. I have two strong ideas, for another Roots of Chaos book.

One of them is more like a sequel to A Day of Fallen Night. I will still try to make it as standalone as possible but basically, immediately following The Grief of Ages there was a period where the other magic, the magic of starlight, went out of control. In A Day of Fallen Night we see what happens when fire magic becomes chaotic and I thought it would be interesting for readers to understand the stakes of this world, if you then see what happens when the other magic goes out of control. That would probably be relatively short in terms of timescale, but if I write the other one that I have in my head, which is about how the magic system went out of control in the first place, it would likely follow these three characters who get mentioned in both books, who are all very powerful women who became immortal, and that would be interesting because two of them are very old in terms of just how long they’ve been around. I think that that book will probably span a pretty long time, probably several centuries, as you see them first becoming immortal and then watching the world change around them.

That would be interesting because I would have to show the world at possibly several different points and figure out again how to distinguish each of those points from the last.

Are you putting some ideas in the trunk for the time when you think you can tackle them or are you the sort of person who wants to tackle something, see if you can do it and if you realise you can’t, then you’ll trunk it?

Yes, I’ve definitely trunked a couple of ideas. One of them, which I’ve now un-trunked, is my Greek goddess reimagining which I will be starting work on this year once I’ve drafted Bone Season 5. That I definitely put aside for a few years because I just wasn’t sure if I had the writing ability to carry it off. Especially because it’s Greek mythology, it’s something that I am coming into as an outsider and I want to do it with as much respect as possible. I knew, that if I did it, I was going to have to really be in the place to do the research and I really wanted to make it really stunningly beautiful in terms of the lyricism of the writing.

I think I needed to write A Day of Fallen Night before I was in the position to do that. I’ve described Priory as an alchemical process for me before; writing feels like alchemy to me and each stage unlocks the next stage. I feel like A Day of Fallen Night, I really paid attention to my writing style in a way I hadn’t previously, down to the rhythm of the sentences. I wanted each sentence to feel like a small poem and by the time I’d finished that, I felt like I could do that a lot more quickly and naturally. I feel like the draft of this book about the goddess Iris will be easier.

In terms of trunking other ideas? I don’t know that I’ve trunked any more at the moment. Writing A Day of Fallen Night has proven to me that I can handle these large books, even if it looks like I’m always left incredibly drained by the end, just because of how much editing and work they take.

I do want to write historical fiction at some point, specifically historical fiction that focuses on the lives of women.

I’d love to read your take on Joan of Arc.

She was a big inspiration on A Day of Fallen Night. She was probably the main historical figure who inspired Glorian but yes, I’d love to do something about Joan of Arc, or maybe Empress Matilda who should have been the first queen regnant of England. I really am very passionate about women’s history and bringing that to light, so I would love to do that but again, because I’m such a perfectionist I would need to be in a certain place to know that I could write historical and do it absolute justice. I think I probably need to write Iris first because Iris is going to be a bridge between the mythological, the more fantastical elements that I’m used to, and some real ancient Greek history. I think that will be a nice bridge to ease me towards historical but I do think I need to write that book first.

Whether it’s Joan or whether you go back to Matilda, you’ve got such a wealth of conflicting sources. Part of the fun is basically who do you believe? It’s historical Would I Lie to You?

Yes, I know. Especially sources about women because often the chroniclers were men and they would often not be particularly thrilled when women stepped out of place, Matilda especially. Often with someone like her, she was deliberately claiming the power of a King, so the men were clearly not very happy about that, hence the anarchy.

Even with Iris, it’s been interesting because she’s a very minor goddess, she only really appears in mythology quite sporadically and I know other authors would probably have gone for a better known figure from Greek mythology. But then I was drawn to Iris for that specific reason, I like the challenge of creating a story where there was only a skeletal story to begin with.

It’s definitely going to be very me because I am probably going to break quite significantly from the classical mythology, specifically to fill in the gaps. So I’m pitching it rather than a faithful retelling of the Iliad or whatever, it’s going to be more like a story inspired by the Greek Goddess Iris.

With A Day of Fallen Night out a couple of weeks after we’re speaking,  I hope you’ve still got that excitement that you had just before The Bone Season came out, that magic of it actually being real on the shelf.

I do and it’s nice to know that I think A Day of Fallen Night is good. I certainly worked hard on it so this is one I’m very excited to share with the world.

A Day of Fallen Night is out now from Bloomsbury; thanks to Ben McCluskey for assistance in arranging this interview.

Photo of the author by Louise Haywood-Schiefer and used with permission