Episode 164: Transcript

Episode: 164: Why Fantasy Goes to Extremes (with Nghi Vo)

Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Annalee, what was the first fantasy story you can ever remember falling in love with?

Annalee: [00:00:07] Well, there were a ton, including the classics like: The Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin. I was a huge fan of Black and Blue Magic by Zilpha Keatley Snyder – a blast from the past for people who read books as kids in the 70’s and 80’s. I loved Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain series, which I think you and I have talked about before, Charlie Jane.

Charlie Jane: [00:00:30] I love those books too. The Black Cauldron.

Annalee: [00:00:33] Oh, so good. The Assistant Pig Keeper. And I think the fantasy book that stuck with me the most was this book called A Mouse and His Child by Russell Hoban. It was one of the first books I think I read on my own, and it was a fantasy. It was really dark and philosophical. It's about a toy mouse. It's two mice who are attached at the hands. It's a father mouse and a child mouse. They're a wind-up toy. And through a series of events that happen to toys, they manage to escape or get thrown away from their house. They become detached from each other, and they go on this incredible quest to become self-winding.

[00:01:14] They want to be able to control their own key in their back. They encounter just all these weird, surreal, creepy things and have to undergo all this harrowing psychological stuff to basically become autonomous. To become creatures that can control their destiny. And I still think about it all the time.

[00:01:36] It was made into a really crappy Disney movie. Do not watch the Disney Movie. Check out A Mouse and His Child by Russell Hoban.

Charlie Jane: [00:01:42] I feel like that's also true of The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander. I've never seen the Disney movie, but I've heard it's not good.

Annalee: [00:01:49] Oh, yeah. Apparently, Lloyd Alexander said about it like, “Yeah, that was a movie totally unrelated to my books, but, you know, it was fine.”

Charlie Jane: [00:02:00] Yeah. So for me as a kid, you know, I have strong memories of reading Phantom Tollbooth as a little kid. I also read, you know, Lloyd Alexander. I read Wrinkle in Time. I forget when I read that, but that was an impact.

Annalee: [00:02:13] Oh, yeah, totally.

Charlie Jane: [00:02:14] But when I think about like my first experience of falling in love with fantasy, I think about comics and I think specifically not about like American, like present day American comics when I was a kid, but like weird either comics that were older or comics that were from Europe. Like I read a lot of Little Nemo in Slumberland. I read a lot of Krazy Kat. I read some of the very early Wonder Woman comics from like the 1930s and 1940s. And I read European comics like Asterix and The Smurfs and Willy and Wanda and just like random like European comics.

[00:02:51] And I feel like we kind of talked about this before about like Over the Garden Wall a little bit. But the thing that joined all of those comics that were like not American comics of the present day is that they were all a little bit surreal, a little bit like weird and kind of like goofy and like kind of off kilter. And they were not superhero comics except for the Wonder Woman comics. But even those were very weird and surreal.

Annalee: [00:03:15] I definitely… I mean, you mentioned Phantom Tollbooth and I loved that too. But I feel like all that stuff tracks for you, like that you liked weird, surreal, absurdist stuff.

[00:03:26]When I was a little kid, my parents took me to lots of movies they shouldn't have taken me too. And they took me to see the movie Heavy Metal because they saw that it was a cartoon and they were like, “Great, cartoon equals kid.” So that was the kind of comic that I was exposed to as a kid.

Charlie Jane: [00:03:46] Yeah. So I feel like maybe the fantasy stories that we bond with as kids are what kind of what shape our aesthetic as adults a little bit. And, you know, something to think about today, we're going to be talking to one of my favorite authors, Nghi Vo.

Annalee: [00:04:00] Yes.

Charlie Jane: [00:04:02] I think it's probably also one of your favorite authors, Annalee, about current trends in fantasy fiction and like this notion that like we're kind of becoming split between like really dark and violent on the one side with like romance and then really cozy and gentle on the other side. Also sometimes with romance. But first we're going to be talking about writing white characters and how to include white people in a story without centering whiteness.

[00:04:28] You're listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. The podcast that went through a portal and like found everything on the other side of the portal exactly the same as on the first side of the portal. I'm Charlie Jane Anders. My next book is Lessons in Magic and Disaster.

Annalee: [00:04:43] It's such a great book. I'm so excited for everyone to like stick their faces into it. I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist and a science fiction writer. And my latest book is called Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind.

Charlie Jane: [00:04:58] Frickin' essential, read. And in next week's mini episode, we're going to be talking about the final season of Star Trek: Lower Decks and just how we're feeling about it so far.

Annalee: [00:05:08] I mean, I'm just going to be crying constantly because the show isn't coming back for another season. So…

Charlie Jane: [00:05:14] It's my happy place.

Annalee: [00:05:15] Yeah, it's so good. And by the way, speaking of happy places, did you know that this podcast is entirely independent and funded by you, our listeners through Patreon? So if you become a patron, you're helping make this podcast happen. You'll get audio extras every week. You'll have access to our Discord channel where we hang out and talk about really pretty much everything. And we also post a lot of pictures of our cats. So think about it. All of that could be yours for just a few bucks a month. Anything you give goes right back into making our opinions even more correct. Find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. All right, here's the show.

[00:05:52] [OOAC theme plays. Science fiction synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]

Charlie Jane: [00:06:25] OK, there's a lot of excellent advice out there for authors who are from like the dominant group who want to write about marginalized people who are different themselves. You know, I love the book Writing the Other by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward. And then now Nisi is also running workshops called Writing the Other with Tempest Bradford, who we've talked about that before and we've had Tempest on the show.

[00:06:48] But what about white authors who want to write white characters without falling into like the traps and tropes of whiteness? We're going to dig into that today. So, Annalee, where should we start?

Annalee: [00:07:00] So I actually have a deep background in this. When I was an academic, I worked on this idea of whiteness studies where we were trying to think about how do you deconstruct the idea of whiteness. And I coauthored an anthology way back in the day called White Trash: Race and Class in America. I coauthored with my colleague Matt Ray, who's still in academia and going strong. And one of the things we found while researching that book is that whiteness is a super American idea. Europeans who are pale skinned have national identities, not whiteness. You know, you're Swedish, you're French, you're not just a white person.

[00:07:41] But once Europeans start colonizing the Americas, there's this push, especially in the United States and Canada, for there to be a kind of unified white identity. And it really becomes successful in the United States. And people start talking about themselves as white instead of Spanish or French. So that's why one of the best places to start with thinking about white identity is with this incredible monograph that Toni Morrison published in the early 1990s about American literature. And it's called Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.

[00:08:17] And she argues that we can't really see whiteness in fiction until we understand how white authors position black people as racial and position white people as basically unraced or racially unmarked. So I'm sending you a quote here. This is from this book by Toni Morrison. Can you read this, Charlie Jane?

Charlie Jane: [00:08:39] Sure. “When does racial unconsciousness or awareness of race enrich interpretive language, and when does it impoverish it? What does positing one's writerly self in the wholly racialized society that is the United States as unraced and all others as raced entail? What happens to the writerly imagination of a black author who is at some level always conscious of representing one's own race too, or in spite of, a race of readers that understands itself to be universal, or race free?”

Annalee: [00:09:17] So I really love this passage because what she's pointing out is that white authors, but also white readers, have this tendency to see white characters as just racially the norm, unmarked, unremarkable, not having a racial identity. But what Morrison points out and tons of other critics is that everyone is racially marked. White people are racially marked. In order to see ourselves as white and to understand what it means to be a white person, we have to see whiteness from the outside. We have to look at whiteness through the eyes of a black author like Toni Morrison when she explains what whiteness looks like to her. And we can do that a lot now in books where we are given the opportunity to read about white people from the outside. So Charlie Jane, what are some books where you can think of this happening?

Charlie Jane: [00:10:11] Yeah, I mean, I've been reading some really fantastic books recently by BIPOC authors, and they're a couple that really come to mind for me. The first is The Blueprint by Rae Giana Rashad, which takes place in an alternate timeline where basically there was a Second Civil War and, you know, civil rights were kind of never... black people never got full civil rights in the United States. And in fact, a new kind of hierarchy was installed where black women are kind of controlled mostly by white men, but then also by black men to a lesser extent. It's more complicated. It's hard to sum up. And people have like GPS chips implanted at birth now. It's like set in the present, but in an alternate timeline. And so like there are people growing up, like you can always track them wherever they go.

[00:10:58] And the main character has this super complicated relationship with a very powerful white guy who is like one of the leaders of Texas. But he's depicted as like this kind of monstrous figure, but, you know, he loves her and values her as his concubine. And she originally fell in love with him, but now has this super complicated relationship and really wants to escape from him. And it's dealt with is like, it's really ambiguous, kind of fucked up, dark, awful relationship.

[00:11:27] But then there's this other character who we beat, who is originally kind of assigned as her kind of protector slash, like she's assigned to be his concubine, because that's one of the roles you can take on if you're a black woman in this society. And he's a white, gay man who tries to be kind to her and like has all these good intentions about like helping her and taking care of her. But every time it's inconvenient for him to actually be there for her, he just flakes on her and like - she wants to be a writer. He takes her to this writer's conference, but then in the end he's like, “Well, there's this dude I've got a crush on and I want to take him instead. So I'm going to renege on my promise to you.” I'm oversimplifying basically what happens. And it's just like, we see him like having the best intentions in the world, and just over and over and over again, just completely not following through on any of it.

[00:12:17] And you know, similarly, another book that I read recently, The Reformatory by Tananarive Due, just an incredible novel. And it's like set, I guess, in the 1950s. There is a lot of like stuff about, you know, Jim Crow that is very like rooted in reality, even though there's ghosts and horror in it. And the white characters generally are just horrific.

[00:12:41] They're just brutal and awful. And like the warden of this reformatory where the main character is sent is just an abuser. It's awful. But there's also this one character, Mr. Lowman, who as a social worker, he's a Jewish guy in the South. He's, you know, basically a white guy. And he kind of wants to help the main character, but he's too scared of retribution. He wants to protect his own family. And in the end, he's actually worse than useless. He actually delivers the main character into the arms of these abusers because he doesn't have the courage to do anything different. And I feel like those are two examples that I've seen recently of like white characters who, we see over and over again, them saying, oh, I have the best intention, so I really want to do the right thing. But nah.

Annalee: [00:13:26] Yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:13:26] And that feels very real to me. That feels like a very accurate kind of depiction.

Annalee: [00:13:32] Yeah. I was thinking a lot about R.F. Kuang's novel, Babel, which I'm sure a lot of people have read. And in that story, which is set in the 19th century, there's a group of students and one of them is a white woman. The rest of them are people of color. And I won't spoil it, even though I'm sure lots of people have read it. Let's just say they get into a really, really, really bad scrape, like a mortal scrape where their lives are on the line and they need to stick together this group. Like if they don't stick together, they're going to get caught. And we think that the white character is going to go along with it. And we're what we're seeing her through the eyes of the main character, who mixed race, Chinese and British. And we see how she's waffling and how they keep trying to explain to her like the danger that they're in and how white people can exert this power over them. And she just can't see it.

[00:14:29] And one of the things that's so powerful about that is seeing from the outside what it looks like when like basically a white liberal is struggling with these things that you are describing with the character of Mr. Lowman, where they're like, “I kind of get it. I want to be an ally. But like also, what are you even talking about?”

Charlie Jane: [00:14:49] And it's just too hard.

Annalee: [00:14:50] It's hard. It's inconvenient. And if those stories were told from the point of view of the white character, it would be a kind of wistfulness like, “Oh, I tried to help. But alas, like life, you know.”

Charlie Jane: [00:15:04] There'd be some unreliable narrator shit going on.

Annalee: [00:15:07] Yeah. And so I think part of what's useful about seeing those kinds of representations, it's not so much to teach white readers like, “Oh, white people can be bad guys.” It's not really about that. It's about showing that white people exist in relation to people of a whole bunch of different backgrounds. You know, white people are not invisible racially. They have a racial position. They have a racial identity. They're visible as white to everyone but themselves.

Charlie Jane: [00:15:36] And it's about complicity. It's about like being part of an oppressive system, about being part of white supremacy and not really…

Annalee: [00:15:44] Not seeing it.

Charlie Jane: [00:15:45] Or seeing it and not being able or willing to actually take actions to remedy it, which I feel like is very much what we've seen in the last like, you know, five years. Like, we've seen this moment where like after George Floyd, after a bunch of other stuff in 2020, white people had this moment of like, “Oh, shit, I am part of white supremacy. I should do something about that.” And then like 30 seconds later being like, “But that's too hard.”

Annalee: [00:16:10] Yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:16:10] Or, you know, “I'll put up a black story on my Instagram. Oh, I've done something kind of.”

Annalee: [00:16:13] Yeah. I would say also kind of coming off that in a less dire register. One of the things that I struggle with a lot as a white writer and have been corrected many, many times is I think there's this unwillingness to portray characters as racial. I often find myself just being like, wait, I want to say that this character is Chinese, but like, is that going to sound weird if I say that? Like, because they are Chinese, but like, if I say it in the description, does that sound... And this is not a thing that like Chinese writers who are friends of mine have a problem with at all. And in fact, I've been told over and over, like, it's fine. Like if you're describing a character, like there's lots of attributes they have. They're humble. They're weird. They're tall. They're Chinese. Like, you know, that's part of their character. But I always feel myself like having this like white person flinch when I describe any character as having a racial identity, because, you know, it's like part of what white people are trained to do is like not notice race, even when we're noticing race.

Charlie Jane: [00:17:23] Yeah, pretend we don't notice.

Annalee: [00:17:25] Yeah, to pretend you don't, to not acknowledge it. And that's exactly what Toni Morrison is talking about, is this impulse to say, “Oh, but we don't see race.” And that's not what I'm thinking consciously when I do it. I just have this internal flinch of like, “Wait, should I say that?” And it's like, “Yes, you should say that dumbass.” Everyone else sees race, like stop pretending like, you know, and that's kind of what I mean about seeing whiteness as part of a whole bunch of different other racial groups, because it's like there's all these other groups out there who are like, “Yep, we see race.” It's only white people who seem to have this little problem of pretending like there's no racial identities involved in any of these stories or any of these political issues.

Charlie Jane: [00:18:03] Yeah. And like some of the advice that I've gotten and that I've kind of taken to heart is just to be sort of matter of fact about it and to talk about like people's identities in a granular kind of like, you know, maybe say someone's Chinese, but also like talk about like, you know, if they're a Chinese American, what are they first generation? Are they fourth generation? Like what part of China did their family come from? Just that kind of stuff. And like, you know, not try to be, there are certain things that white writers do that are, you know, they're trying to be cute about it or whatever. And like, one time I was asked to blurb a novel, this was years ago, I was asked to blurb a novel and I had to write back to the author and be like, “Hey, I want to blurb your novel, but you say stuff like you describe an Asian characters having almond shaped eyes.” And I sent them a link to an essay that our friend Claire Light wrote about, like how describing Asian people as having almond shaped eyes is like A, inaccurate and B, super offensive. And luckily the author was able to take that out and take out some of the other stuff I flagged for him. I feel like I've done that for a few books I've blurbed actually, where I've just been like, “Yeah, I want to blurb your book, but you got to fix these. I can't put my name on a book that has these things in it. Sorry.” Like that's happened a few times.

[00:19:14] And one thing that I have tried to do, like the flip side of what I just said about like, if you're saying a character is Chinese American, like maybe dig a little deeper into like, you know, did they come from Hong Kong? Did they come from mainland China? Did they come from like…

Annalee: [00:19:28] Texas.

Charlie Jane: [00:19:29] But I mean, where did their ancestors come from and where did they grow up?

Annalee: [00:19:31] Right.

Charlie Jane: [00:19:32] What generation are they like? Were their parents born in China? Were their parents born in Texas? You know, what kind of household did they grow up in? But the flip side of that is when I write about white characters, now I really try… I don't know if I always do a great job of this, but one thing I think about consciously is giving my white characters an identity that's not just white and being like, okay, Scottish and German, or like this character grew up in Minnesota, like in a Lutheran household, you know, just like specifics, making it more specific.

[00:20:03] Because as you kind of pointed out at the start of this conversation, whiteness, we see it as a monolith, but it's not a monolith. And actually, like whiteness has, there's many strands of whiteness in many kinds of cultures buried within whiteness. And it's like, you know, my mom is a Scandinavian from like North Dakota who grew up Lutheran, you know, but I know white people who are, you know, WASPs. I know white people who their ancestors came over on the Mayflower. I don't know.

Annalee: [00:20:31] Yeah, I think particularizing, you know, people's identities is a big part of this. One of the failure modes I see a lot with white writers is that they try to make racial identity a kind of gotcha. Like they'll tell a story where they'll be really coy about what the people's racial identities are, and they won't ever say like, this is a black person, or they'll try to hint at it with like the language that the person uses, or like where they're from, or like, have it like somehow emerge, like over time that suddenly you're supposed to be like, “Oh, my, this character is Asian. Oh, that changes everything.” And I just, I hate that. I feel like I only see white writers do that. And it's, it's a piece of what I was talking about before of like white writers being anxious about talking about race. And so then they turn it into this thing where it's like, “Well, like if you figure it out, you figure it out.” And it's like, again, that's not how humans work.

[00:21:25] Like we're aware of race all the time when you meet someone. And it's just okay to say like, “the person was tall and black”, or “this person walked really slowly and was Vietnamese American”. And like, you can go into other details about them later. You know, like…

Charlie Jane: [00:21:43] Yeah, I'll see authors brag about it occasionally, where they'll be like, “Oh, you didn't even realize that this character was black.” And I'm like, yeah, that's because you failed.

Annalee: [00:21:51] Yeah, it's like, that's because you're a white person. And you're really into this idea that like race that you can sort of be unraced as Toni Morrison said. And it's like, yeah, only white people get to have that privilege of like pretending like they're unraced. I wanted to mention one other thing before we move on to talking to Nghi Vo, which is that when we're thinking about white characters, there is this kind of paradox at the heart of white identity. And it's been around for a long time in the United States. And you see pieces of it even going back to like the 19th century with Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis, which he wrote in the 1890s. Probably a lot of us had to read that in school.

[00:22:29] And one of the things he says in that is that the American character, meaning whites, that white people's characters are based on erasing and absorbing indigenous cultures in the West. And he talks about this very explicitly as what makes white Americans different from Europeans is that they've absorbed all of this indigenous culture and left nothing of those indigenous people behind. And of course, he never says like, “Yay, genocide”, because he's not even thinking in those terms. He's just thinking culturally.

Charlie Jane: [00:23:01] And of course, it's not true that we did erase all those people. We just want to think we did.

Annalee: [00:23:06] Right. And he's one of the people who perpetuated that idea. I mean, his Frontier Thesis was taught in history books for half a century or more. And this comes back again, in the present, in the form of what's often called racial capitalism, which is all about how white identity is built through consuming the identities of BIPOC and through kind of defining white identity as the thing that consumes BIPOC, but also rejects it.

[00:23:39] And Eric Lott has a great book, called Love and Theft, where he says that if you really want to understand white identity, think about the minstrel show. And the minstrel show is this perfect example of whiteness declaring itself as white by stealing black music, by dressing up as black people and performing black music, making money on that music, but then also rejecting actual black people.

[00:24:07] So that's kind of the heart of like that paradox in white identity. Of wanting to absorb the other, but also reject it and make money on that too. Like to gain power from it, to gain capital from it. And this is like exactly what's underlying a movie like Get Out, which is totally about, you know, white people stealing black people's money and bodies and lives. Or Rebecca Roanhorse's amazing story that won like every award, which is called Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience. And it's all about packaging indigenous identity. And so in a sense, the ultimate white person is a pretendian or a person in blackface. Like that is kind of the heart, the paradoxical heart of white identity.

[00:24:56] And so as we write white characters, I think it's important to think about that deep structure in the white psyche. That paradox is something that we've all been taught and that is part of how we move through the world. And either we acknowledge it and work through it or we don't, and we have all kinds of weird fucked up symptoms.

Charlie Jane: [00:25:17] Yeah, it is foundational, especially in the United States, I feel like. Although, you know, I think Europe has like long since, you know, kind of glommed onto this idea too, having lived in Europe.

Annalee: [00:25:28] We invented it here in the States.

Charlie Jane: [00:25:30] You know, I think it is foundational in the United States. Like every time I hear that song, Moves Like Jagger, I'm like, you know that Mick Jagger stole all his moves from James Brown, right? You know that like literally that Mick Jagger doesn't have any moves of his own. It's just he watched James Brown and copied him like and ask Mick Jagger, he'll tell you that. But yeah, this idea that like, oh, Mick Jagger has great moves. I mean, that is kind of the story of a lot of American culture in a nutshell.

Annalee: [00:25:57] That's a classic white move.

Charlie Jane: [00:25:59] You know, a classic white move is to steal a black person's moves. Yes.

Annalee: [00:26:02] Or other group, you know, steal something else and then make money on it.

Charlie Jane: [00:26:06] Yeah. And I feel like, you know, it's not something that we can just be like, you know, we're going to just like move on from that. We have to acknowledge it. We have to grapple with it. We have to kind of make sense of it, you know, and celebrate. I think I've talked about this before, but I went to an amazing panel on appropriation in music at the Brooklyn Book Festival before the pandemic. And they kind of talked about like the thing is who gets the money and who gets the acknowledgement. And so just making sure that creators of color are getting the money and getting the acknowledgement. That's like the number one thing. That's what you always have to be doing.

Annalee: [00:26:40] Yeah, exactly. And also like I said, in terms of writing, thinking about white characters in the context of all of the other ethnic and racial groups around them, you know, thinking about how whiteness is a relational identity. It isn't unmarked. It is its own racial identity. And it doesn't exist without all these other groups. So think about how your white characters are interacting with people of different backgrounds. And that will really help, I think, to make white characters that aren't falling into that trope of, “Oh, they're they're unraced. They're just a generic person.” They're not. White people have their own issues.

Charlie Jane: [00:27:17] Sure do.

Annalee: [00:27:19] All right. Well, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to talk with Nghi Vo about fantasy.

[00:27:27] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.

Charlie Jane: [00:27:30] So now we're super lucky to be joined by the incredible Nghi Vo. Nghi Vo's latest book is The City in Glass. She's also the author of the novels Siren Queen and The Chosen and the Beautiful. As well as the acclaimed novellas of the Singing Hills Cycle, which began with the Empress of Salt and Fortune.

[00:27:47] The entries in this series have been finalists for the Locust Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and they've won the Crawford Award, the Ignite Award and the Hugo Award. Welcome, Nghi Vo.

Nghi: [00:27:59] Hello, thank you so much for having me. It's so nice to see everyone.

Charlie Jane: [00:28:02] It's so great to see you, too.

Annalee: [00:28:03] Yeah, it's nice to have you.

Charlie Jane: [00:28:05] It's good to hang out again. So I have this theory, which I kind of told you about on email, which is that, like, I feel like fantasy is going in two really different directions right now. Like, I'm seeing a lot of cozy fantasy where everything is just sort of nice and friendly and nothing super terrible happens. And then I'm also seeing a lot of fantasy that's like super kind of dark and violent, where often there's like a romance with somebody who's kind of a terrible monster who's like a mass murderer or something. And, you know, do you think that this is my theory is correct? Do you think that I'm right about this?

Nghi: [00:28:38] I think you're definitely on to something because Tor.com sent me on tour earlier this year and they sent me on tour with with a pack of really great writers. But among them was Becky Thorne, who did You Can't Spell Treason Without Tea. And on the other hand was Veronica Roth, who has her very grim, but very beautiful supernatural urban adult series coming out. And so on one hand, you have tea and the other hand, you have people ripping bone swords out of their bodies. And I'm like, I feel like they put me here, and this just fun and exciting. And I don't know what's happening, but it's really neat.

Charlie Jane: [00:29:15] I love that. So how do you feel like you fit into this? Like, I feel like a book like Mammoths at the Gates is fairly cozy. Like, I don't want to give any spoilers, but like, there's like the potential for violence, but then it never actually kind of materializes. I guess that's a bit of a spoiler. And then The City in Glass has an extremely high body count and gets very dark. And so do you think that how do you think that you're kind of in the middle or that you go back and forth?

Nghi: [00:29:44] I will tell you this as far as the whole publishing journey for me has been going. I've been at this for about four years. I've been writing full time much longer than that. But I've been at this for about four years. And the whole time, it just feels like slipping off the last step off a stairwell and like plunging towards a bunch of broken glass. So I actually don't know what's happening or where I fit. I just know that checks keep arriving in the mail. And I'm like, “OK, whatever I'm doing, someone out there needs it. Someone needs us talking about how cute mammoths are when they play on the planes and someone else clearly needs a head in a bucket.” And I'm like, I can do that. I can I can provide that.

Annalee: [00:30:24] Do you think there is a boundary between these two extremes? Like Charlie Jane was sort of sketching out like, well, we have the extreme coziness and then you'd have like Cass Khaw all the way over in like the extreme darkness side or whatever. So where do we draw that line? Like another way to put this would be like how creepy can a story get before it loses the coziness?

Nghi: [00:30:45] I don't know. See, it's interesting you bring up Cass Khaw, whose work is wonderful. I got to read their anthology that came out last year and I was super excited about it. And on one hand, yes, Cass Khaw is dealing with some of the darkest things we can be dealing with in terms of just gore and horror and what happens when the ghost inside the walls comes clawing out and wants to eat your face. But on the other hand, there's also this really tenderness to their work as well, especially when you get into thoughts about family and where we've been and where we're going. And the fact that, I don't know, for me, Khaw really kind of digs into the idea that a lot of us grew up in haunted houses and the horror is a deeply personal place and the horror can be where we're comfortable and sometimes, you know, and you live in a haunted house and that's still where you learn to make tea, you know, and that's that feels part of it. It feels like all of a piece for me. And I'm not sure if that's useful, but that's what I'm working with right this minute.

Charlie Jane: [00:31:47] Yeah. And actually, I was thinking this morning and like a piece that kind of came to me is that like another huge trend in fantasy right now is these retellings. Like you have a ton of fairy retail retellings like Ursula Vernon is doing a bunch of those. You have retellings of like Greek mythology or like other, you know, mythologies from around the world. There's also retellings of classic stories like obviously the Great Gatsby and some of those stories that were retelling are really fucked up, but also kind of a source of comfort. So, you know, I don't know, how does that complicate things?

Nghi: [00:32:20] I mean, I think for a lot of us stories, the stories that are very important to this, they're a type of home, you know, I mean, the most the clearest way we can come, we can tell a story is the clearest way we can say, be quiet now, I'm going to tell you something is “once upon a time”. But, you know, I'm also from the Midwest. So plenty of really awesome stories start off with “no shit there I was”. Or “guess how I ended up in Indiana this weekend”, you know.

[00:32:48] And when it comes right down to it, there is the pleasure of familiarity in fairy tales. But there's the fact that I think one thing that we that a lot of these retellings are kind of pushing us towards is that we outgrow the stories we're given as children. And we outgrow, I mean, you can outgrow Snow White, you can outgrow everything from a parent telling you this is how you're supposed to be or this is how you are appropriately yourself. And we outgrow those stories. And as we retell the stories, as we shape them to ourselves, to our faces, to our bodies, to the reality in which we live, we're making them renewable. We're also kind of keeping that comfort and the strength they gave us originally, which is - it's wonderful. It is the familiar and it is new. And I think it's sometimes it's the best place to be playing.

Annalee: [00:33:39] Yeah, that's so interesting, because that makes me think about so many of the really toxic fandom debates that we're seeing right now with some of the big movie franchises where people are like, you know, like, “Oh, don't change the Star Wars of my childhood” just to pick on that because that's an easy one. You know, and like you're saying, no, we outgrow those and we want something new. And some people are like, “Fuck, no, we are never outgrowing these original stories. We don't want anything new.” And so that I mean, that's just an interesting way of considering how all of the stories and stuff is playing out.

[00:34:15] So another question I wanted to ask, though, sorry, that was just my daily invocation of why certain Star Wars fans need to be thrown in the trash can. So one question is about so when we're thinking about the darkness and the coziness, do you think there's such a thing as extreme comfort? Like, do you know what I mean? Like, that there's - because we know that there's something that's that we could call, say, like violent catharsis, extreme horror, extreme violence, like all of that stuff. I feel like we have we've mapped that territory. But are we also in an era of extreme comfort? Like we really need that like super comfort zone. Like it's not just going to be tea. It's going to be blankets. It's going to be a fireplace. It's going to be like all of the things that make us comfy.

Nghi: [00:35:03] It's going to be Annalise with the tea service to the face.

Annalee: [00:35:08] What do you think? Is that a thing like extreme comfort?

Nghi: [00:35:11] I would very much like to see it if that is the case. So I generally don't read my own reviews. Mostly they just they're just sent to me, sometimes hilariously, because my friends just want to see what my face does when I read some of these. But what it comes down to, I think, is I'm hearing a lot of things about The City in Glass coming out, which is “there's really no plot here”. And I don't know what to do with that. I'm like, I didn't know what to do with it either. I just wrote it. I just I just work here. OK.

[00:35:46] And what that comes down to is even without a plot, I think a lot of people, I hope a lot of people are having a good time with it. And if and if we're looking for like the extreme comfort, like if we have catharsis in the extreme end of horror, which is like heightened conflict and fear for life and limb and the ability to continue as you are, one imagines that the extreme comfort might be a sort of illusionary, but still very sweet and very loving kind of stasis because there's a certain safe…

[00:36:18] Like, I am a big proponent of “change is the great constant”. The only thing that never changes is that we're going to be changing. And that is a comfort for me, but it's also a little terrifying. When is the next change coming for me? Who am I going to be at the end of it? And so if there are such a things as extreme comfort, I kind of wonder if it is a kind of beautiful stasis that doesn't involve a lot of conflict, you know, it's the ability not only to have blankets, but to not worry about having the blankets taken away from us. Like there's a blanket economy going on here. I feel like, you know, blankets do not move. The blankets do not shift. The blankets stay with me. And so does, and so does my cat who was getting old. And so is the tea I might not be able to get again. And yeah…

[00:37:03] I've been telling people that my cat is seven, six or seven for like seven years now. And if you keep telling them that the cat actually does age. So I had to wake up to the reality. My cat's 13 this year. And I'm like, “Oh God”, he's fine. He's literally. Yeah, he's literally just sitting there unhappily because I'm not touching him right now.

Annalee: [00:37:25] Classic cat.

Charlie Jane: [00:37:26] Yeah, 13 is the prime of life. He's got, you know, he's got a while.

Nghi: [00:37:30] That's what I'm telling myself.

Charlie Jane: [00:37:31] You know, I feel like a lot of cozy fiction I read, there are obstacles that have to be overcome, but they're, they're… But you overcome them and they're not that bad in the end. Like, you know, you think of like Sangu Mandanna who wrote the, I'm going to, I'm going to mess up this title, The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches, which is a lovely cozy book. And there are like, Oh my gosh, this bad thing could happen, but then it's actually okay. And like we get past it and like, actually this person we thought might be scary turned out not to be that scary and like that kind of thing.

[00:38:01] You know, I mean, I feel like my theory is just that, and my theory of like life in general, as well as like fiction, is that right now is a really scary time to be alive. It's intense. It's really fucked up. There's a lot of bad stuff happening in the world. And basically we can choose to either, you know, kind of try to escape from it into something that's more kind of comforting and more kind of, you know, that just is kind of like, you can, you can kind of forget for like a few hours that the world is so messed up, or you can confront it and be like, “I'm going to just run headlong towards the scary stuff and like, just look it straight in the face.” Like those are the two kind of basic approaches when you're living through like a never ending, like flaming shit storm, like we are.

Nghi: [00:38:49] Absolutely.

Charlie Jane: [00:38:49] And so, you know, when I read a book like Mammoths at the Gate, I find it like kind of takes me away from the scariest of the world. But when I read a book like The City in Glass, which by the way, I've read a bunch of like people talking about The City in Glass where they're like, “this book has too much plot. It's just too much plot. It's a short book with like so much plot.”

Nghi: [00:39:07] Shit, I don't know what I'm doing.

Charlie Jane: [00:39:10] So I don't know. I feel like… Do you think about that when you're writing these books about like whether you want people to confront the scariness of the world or not confront it? Or do you just think of it in terms of like, I have a cool idea for a story or...

Nghi: [00:39:23] Okay, so here's I think this is a thing that I think more people should know about me. I've been a freelance writer for about 15 years. And before you before I showed up in traditional publishing, I was working in I was working for a lot of I was doing a lot of gig work, you know, it's vacuum cleaner parts and how to raise roaches and answering questions on the internet. Like can you ride a bear? The answer is no, you cannot ride a bear or a hippo or an elk. Don't do any of those things.

Charlie Jane: [00:39:49] Why would you raise roaches?

Nghi: [00:39:51] To feed to lizards. If you keep lizards or other reptiles, you raise roaches because inevitably it becomes much cheaper and more effective and in some ways more humane to raise the roaches yourself. And yeah, and I love these people who raise their roaches, because they take such good care of them. And they're very, very… It's very important for them to make sure the roaches are as nutritious as possible for their lizard. So there's a lot of there's a lot of debate. There's a lot of talk. It's a very it's a very dedicated community.

Annalee: [00:40:27] Farm to table, roach farm to lizard table.

Nghi: [00:40:30] Yeah, I ducked out before my client got into the question of should can and should humans eat this? And I'm like, “I need to find a new job. I can feel roaches all over me, right now.” And, you know, it was a whole thing. But when it comes to writing, I'm very used to writing to spec. So, you know, they give me an assignment. I run off and I write it. And so this has been a weird gig for me these last four years. I'm still kind of new at thinking, What do I want my audience to get from my work?” I'm much more at “Can I hit this deadline? Can I can I write something that fulfills what I told my agent or my editor it was going to be?” That's new and exciting and fun for me.

[00:41:20] But I mean, but what it comes down to is my big hope for all of my writing, no matter what it is, you know, the the complete genocide that happens in City in Glass, the sort of smaller morning story of Mammoths at the Gate. I want them to have a good night. You know, I want them to be OK for the few hours it takes to read my book. And I'm joking mostly when I tell people, “Well, look, it's short. And if you're mad at me, you're only mad at me for a few hours.” But no, I want them. I want to show people a good time. That's historically what I want to do socially. It's what I want to do as an entertainer. It's what I do when…It's what I want to do when I have people over for dinner.

Annalee: [00:42:00] That does sound kind of cozy.

Charlie Jane: [00:42:03] And you do not feed people roaches when you have them over for dinner. We just want to make that clear.

Nghi: [00:42:06] I do not. I do not. The worst I've ever done is passed around a can of dried silkworms and say, “Hey, does anyone want to try dried silkworms?” And they weren't very good dried silkworms. So they kind of tasted like musty peanuts. And I think that's probably what they fed them. They weren't very good. And I think they were kind of old. But we got to try something new, which was entertaining.

Annalee: [00:42:27] I had really delicious cricket tacos when I was in Mexico. And

Nghi: [00:42:33] Oh, yeah. Insect protein.

Annalee: [00:42:34] Yeah. And it's like you don't even think about what it is because it's so deliciously cooked up with like garlic and pepper and like it's crunchy and it's like it could be anything. And honestly, I could have eaten it and not known it was crickets, but I did specially order it that way. So it really is about the seasoning. You know, silkworms, I'm sure, would be also delicious if you stir fried them with like garlic and ginger.

[00:42:56] And as we're coming to the end here, I wanted to ask you a little bit about some of the larger world of the fantasy genre, thinking about cozy fantasy versus romantasy, which is like one of those… “Romantasy” is one of those words like “synergy” that's sort of invented by corporations to describe a bunch of stuff, you know, that they want to sell. But romantasy is this huge strand in fantasy writing right now. And oftentimes it does have really evil authority figures and kind of strands of darkness that you don't see in cozy fantasy, where oftentimes, like the authority figures are people like a cleric who's actually genuinely wants to do good in the world or like the authority figures are kind and have people's best interests at heart.

[00:43:48] I wonder if you see that going on too, if you see that being one of the ways in which these genres are divided up, like there's the cozy world of nice authority figures and in romantasy, like, you know, all cops are bastards kind of worldview.

Nghi: [00:44:08] Okay, so I have a couple theories about this one. One of the ones that comes to mind is the fact that, you know, as, as you were saying, a lot of these, a lot of genres are ways to market to us, but they're also ways to maybe help us find the stories we're looking for. So when you go looking for a cozy versus a romantasy or a cozy romantasy or a grim dark romantasy or, you know, a hopeful, but grim dark romantasy, these are, you know, we're just throwing away words to say, “Hey, read my book, please.”

[00:44:38] But I mean, okay, so here's the thing. I don't have a lot of experience with romantasy, but I did, I did do an event recently with Penn Cole, who's, her series, I believe has been out in the pub for a while. And I think she just pulled a big deal with Simon Schuster. So that the first one was coming out and it looks gorgeous. But what I really got the vibe from when I was paneling with her was there is this beautiful promise to her readers that it's going to be okay, it's going to be terrible, and it's going to be okay. And that is an attitude I see a lot from hanging out with romance writers, like, you know, people who are doing straight romance.

[00:45:24] And what I've learned about romance writers is first, do not fuck with them. They're the real thing. Second, the thing is, I've heard a lot of people say, you know, kind of in a belittling fashion, you know, well, what's the point of romance, you know, it's going to be a happy ending. I'm like, fucker, you don't understand that a good romance writer guarantees you the happy ending, but makes you scared along the way. And that's a hard trick. And romance writers pull it off like no one else does as far as I'm concerned.

[00:45:53] So I think part of it is with romantasy and with cozy and with our more cozy fantasy genre, we have that guaranteed happy ending. It's just how we get there. And one thing when I was advertising, when I was learning to market myself, I said, I'm not… I can't sell anything on suspense. I'm a very predictable writer. So I'll tell you, I'll tell you, this is going to be okay. That's, that's the promise for Siren Queen as a promise for Chosen. It's really the promise for City in Glass, it will be okay for some value, for my value of that, which is a warning in and of itself.

Charlie Jane: [00:46:32] Yeah, so I actually have one final question, and then we will definitely let you go. And coming back to City in Glass, which is such a it's such a bold novel, like, you know, it starts out with this city being destroyed. And then the angel that helps to destroy the city is cursed. It has to stay in the ruins of the city with the demon who kind of was the patron of the city. It's like such a… It's such an interesting, weird book. You say that you you just try to like, live up to what you promised your editor with each of these books. I want to know what was the pitch to your editor for the City in Glass.

Nghi: [00:47:06] Okay, here we go. So I was coming off of writing Chosen. I was very tired. My sister just got married. I’d just flown all over the country. I was stressed out and she called me and said as good agents will do. “So what's next?” And what I came up with what I told her verbatim was, “Have you ever wondered if you could fuck a library?” And there's this. Yeah, there's this there's this complete silence from the other end of the line. And I'm like, “Oh, I need to I need to make this up to her.” And as if this was the problem, like “The answer is yes, in case you're wondering.” And then she's like, “You know what? You go get that; you write that.” And then she made me pitch it to my editor Ruoxi Chen at the time. She made me pitch it in exactly the same way. So something good was happening there. I don't pretend to know how agents and editors work. They're like these magical creatures that exist on a different plane than I do that plane being Manhattan. So they saw something I knew what I wanted to write. And, you know, we got to the end of City in Glass and they just like, “You definitely fulfilled the promise of that prompt.” I'm like, thank you.

Annalee: [00:48:11] I have to say, I have often thought about fucking a library. And indeed, we were just talking about this the other day, like “what public buildings are the sexiest?” Like, you know, and it's like, because I also have a thing for public transit, you know, so it's like, you know, I'm hot… I'm basically just hot for like, you know, anything that's provided to the public that makes our lives better.

Nghi: [00:48:35] I mean, maybe we just we want to be served. We want to be sheltered. I think we're going back to the cozy. I mean, there was that old anime about that was just about personified Japanese train lines as handsome young men. And I'm like, this is cool. I could be into this. It was it was like from the 90s. I don't remember, but I'll have to look it up and send it to you. But the fun part was they were all like real train lines and every time… Like the shortest one was like the shortest train line in length was also like the shortest guy on the cast.

Annalee: [00:49:09] I love that.

Nghi: [00:49:11] And it was all real information about the Tokyo train lines. It was awesome.

Charlie Jane: [00:49:13] Oh, my God.

Annalee: [00:49:14] It's like we've turned all of the trains into like hosts at your favorite host club.

Nghi: [00:49:20] Exactly.

Charlie Jane: [00:49:23] Oh, my God. Thank you so much for joining us. Oh, where can people find you on the Internet?

Nghi: [00:49:27] OK, you can find me at my website, NghiVo.com. You can also find me on Bluesky under the also as well under Nghi Vo.

Charlie Jane: [00:49:34] Rock on. Thanks so much.

Annalee: [00:49:36] Yeah, thanks again for coming.

Nghi: [00:49:37] Thank you so much for having me. This is so much fun.

[00:49:39] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.

Charlie Jane: [00:49:42] Thank you so much for listening. Remember that you can find us all over the Internet. We're on Bluesky. We're on Instagram. We're on Patreon. We're on all the places. We're at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. If you just stumbled upon us, you can subscribe everywhere. Please give us a review if you like the podcast. Reviews help a lot like they help a lot…

Annalee: [00:50:02] Like totally a lot.

Charlie Jane: [00:50:03] Like a lot a lot. And thanks so much to our incredible producer and engineer, Niah Harmon, who is just like always a freaking hero in our lives. Thanks so much to Chris Palmer and Katya Lopez Nichols for the music. And thanks again to you for listening. You know, we'll be back in two weeks with another episode, but we'll be back next week with a mini episode if you're one of our Patreon supporters. And also, if you're one of our Patreon supporters, we'll be geeking out with you in Discord.

Both: [00:50:27] Bye.

[00:50:31] [OOAC theme plays. Science fiction synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]

Annalee NewitzNovember 15, 2024