An artist, an engineer, a psychologist, a lawyer and his wife, a veteran, a college kid, a programmer, and a scientist encounter a tree...
A friend recommended this book to me as "It's a story about trees, but it's also not about trees. It's about people, but not just people."
This book... I'm going to be thinking about it for a while. I think this goes on my list of "books you wish you could experience for the first time again." It's a very slow start, and then a rush of story growth and branching, and then it slows again - not wholly unlike the trees that make up such a huge part of the story.
My only complaint, and trying to avoid spoilers as much as possible, would be not dealing head on with Dr Westerford's choice in her last speech. I feel it would have been a much more powerful end to her story for her end to be clearer, an unambiguous action, and without the weird Mimi's Magic Eyes scene. A clearer decision would have helped strengthen one of the book's themes that death sustains life (e.g. a rotting log becoming a seed bed), rather than the narrative looking away and giving you a choice as to what happened.
Overall, I loved this book so much. It made me think of The OA several times - and honestly if you loved that show, then you'll probably love this book.
So, what made you want to create a guide to taking over the world? What makes you qualified to be taking on this very important public service?
I’ve been writing superhero comics for Marvel and DC for years, and part of the job is coming up with these big ambitious charismatic plots for the villains to pull off (throwing your enemies into the sun, digging a hole to the Earth’s core, becoming immortal, that sort of thing). I thought it would be fun to explore how credible they are here in the real world, where we don’t have things like shrink rays and mind-control helmets. So really, it’s a book exploring the edges of science and technology through the lens of comic book supervillainy.
That, and I think having a book in your house with “HOW TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD” on the spine is inarguably awesome.
Who is this book for? What makes an aspiring supervillain?
One thing I kept in mind when writing the book is that I always wanted to talk about super-crime, big huge heists that have never been done before, rather than the stuff that happens routinely here in the real world. Robbing a bank is normal crime. Stealing a bank is when you get into the fun space of super-crime.
There are a couple reasons for that: real-world villainy is horrible and dehumanizing, and I’m absolutely not qualified to write about it, but the idea of trying to pull off comic book super-crime in the real world is interesting and fun, and I am absolutely willing and able to think those plots through to their logical conclusions. You want a secret base? Terrific, but you’re going to need a way to keep it secret—so let’s look at the challenges of living long-term at sea, or underground, or underwater, or in space, or on Mars, etc. And henchpeople require air and food and water—so now we need to think about farming in these conditions and generating power to support all of that. But really, the biggest challenge is that people also get weird and sad when locked alone together, so let’s lock eight people in a room together for two years and see what happens, by which I mean, let’s study the IRL Biosphere 2 experiment where they did precisely that, and everyone went more than a little crazy. As soon as you take these plots seriously and start thinking things through to their logical conclusions, a lot of really interesting science and history and sociology falls out.
In the book, I define supervillainy as when someone outside existing power structures accomplishes something that’s not getting done on its own. The fun thing about that is that the exact same definition applies to superheroes. So really, it’s for anyone who wants to learn more about the world around them through this fun fictional lens, and especially those who have read the news and thought, “You know what? I could do it better.”
Given a choice, which scheme would be your preferred mode of world domination, and why?
There’s a chapter where we look at the problem of immortality, which sounds like complete fantasy until you look at all these tech bros who desperately don’t want to die and are spending fabulous amounts of money on trying to delay it for as long as possible, or even indefinitely. We look at the actual science of aging and the technologies people are trying to develop to stop it, but for me, the most interesting part happens when you say, “okay, so assume any of this works. What then?”
Put aside the fact that very few people would look at our planet with seven billion people on it and say, “You know what? This world needs more people. Oh, and they should never die.” Also, put aside the fact that death is a safety valve on human civilization, where even the worst people we’ve ever produced can’t hang on to power forever because they too will die. The real issue is whether you put your chips on cryonics or uploading your brain to a computer or cloning or telomere extension or whatever. These are all medical or technological interventions, which means they all cost money—and the second you have an immortality scheme that costs money, you’ve created this almost cartoonish dystopia where rich people get to live forever, and poor people don’t. I don’t see a way around it—immortality is something that would absolutely be horrible for both the planet and for us as a civilization.
But!
If you’re the only one who’s immortal—if you discover it and hide it from the world and never share your technology, then all those issues just disappear. Now immortality is just this fun thing you’re doing, and the rest of the world doesn’t have to suffer. You get all the benefits of living indefinitely, learning more than the rest of us ever will, and nobody else has to suffer! For me, that’s the peak supervillain mindset: wanting to make the world a better place but ending up helping only yourself. That’s the scheme in the book I’d do. Not take over the place, but just…stick around and watch it for a lot longer.
Lina Rather is a speculative fiction author from Michigan now living in Washington, D.C. Her stories have appeared in various publications, including Shimmer, Flash Fiction Online, and Lightspeed.
Her current work, Our Lady of Endless Worlds, is a space opera about faith and duty, redemption and revelation, and nuns in a giant slug in outer space. The first book in the series, Sisters of the Vast Black, won the Golden Crown Literary Society Goldie award and was shortlisted for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. Its sequel, Sisters of the Forsaken Stars, is now out to all the places that sell good books—possibly interrupting Lina’s non-writing pursuits of cooking overly elaborate recipes, reading history, and collecting cool rocks and terrible 90s comic books.
Click through to read more about squishy technology, advice for burgeoning SFF authors, and some amazing SFF litfic reading recs!
How would you describe Sisters of the Forsaken Stars to someone new to your work?
Sisters of the Forsaken Stars is the sequel to Sisters of the Vast Black (definitely start there!) and follows an order of interplanetary nuns as they travel in their living slug-ship between worlds in need of charity or medical help. In the second book, the Sisters are on their own, cast out of the Church after uncovering a terrible conspiracy—the whole foundation of their lives has changed. They have to deal with that grief and trauma while also choosing what role they will play in a war that is surely coming.
SOTFS is the second novella in your space opera series. Did youalways envision a series?
Not initially, but by the time I finished the first book, I knew I wanted to spend more time with the women aboard the ship, Our Lady of Impossible Constellations. Each of them is a little bit of me in a different way, and I loved following them as they found their way down new paths in the wake of the first book.
The Sisters in SOTFS all have very different personalities. How do you approach writing different personalities’ copingmechanisms?
Each of the Sisters has something they truly cherish in life. Whether that’s faith, stability, or community, the events of the previous book have shaken those tenets. I focused on each of those things—what does it feel like for each of them to lose their grounding? What will they do to regain it? What happens if they can’t?
There are several intricate and complex bonds between characters in SOTFS—for example, a romantic lesbian relationship that’s refreshing in that it isn’t a focal point ofthe story and gets to just be quiet and tender. Did you enjoy writing that relationship?
I did! With Gemma, I wanted to write about someone who is going through a new “coming-of-age” later in life and having to learn who she is and how to be part of a relationship. I think many queer people, myself included, are familiar with feeling like they’re stumbling through another adolescence after coming out or leaving home. Too often, starting a relationship is the end of a story, but so often, that’s just the beginning—Gemma may love Vauca, but at the start of SOTFS, she doesn’t know how to do the work of that.
Alice, if you were to tell yourself the day you published your first episode of Heartstopper that in a few years, you were going to get a TV show, what would past you say?
“Yes, of course we were pretentious – what else is youth for? We used terms like ‘Weltanschauung’ and ‘Sturm und Drang’, enjoyed saying ‘That’s philosophically self-evident’, and assured one another that the imagination’s first duty was to be transgressive.”
