I’m E J (Emma) Swift, author of OSIRIS, which is released June this year. It’s lovely to be here at the Bazaar! I’m particularly enamoured of the Bazaar theme. It’s the sort of thing you might stumble upon unexpectedly, not quite knowing what you might find, and that kind of encapsulates how I feel about the creative process of writing OSIRIS.
It’s introductions week, so in the traditions of such things, a bit of background about me and how I got here: I’m an English writer, nowadays living in South London with two cats and a long-suffering housemate. My day job involves communications-type-things for performing arts training, and although the pointe shoes have long since been relegated to the back of the wardrobe, I’ve become obsessed with aerial circus skills. (That’s definitely a future novel. And yep, I have a lot of love for Angela Carter’s NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS.) As I’m sure is the case with many writers, my road to publication is littered with discarded novels, but at the end of last year I had my first sale, a story called THE COMPLEX, in UK magazine Interzone. And that was awesome. A week later I found out that Night Shade were interested in OSIRIS. And that was beyond awesome.
Finding out that you’re going to be a professional writer is, whilst being the culmination of a lifetime of dreams, in equal measure terrifying. It’s no longer possible to simply fling the book out into the ether and hope for the best; the Internet is waiting, and it’s full of tigers. My immediate worry was: I don’t know enough. I don’t know enough and I haven’t read enough, or not the right things. But you can never read enough. The only way I’ve found to deal with that worry so far is by a) making decisions and b) trying to turn it into an opportunity. There are books and writers waiting to be discovered, recommendations to be made. That’s something to be excited about.
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Dystopian fiction is a time-honored tradition in genre. Beginning with HG Wells and continuing with Huxley, Orwell, Bradbury, Vonnegut, Atwood, and right into the present day with Bacigalupi and Collins, dystopias fascinate and frighten us with what is possible in human society. A well-established subgenre of speculative fiction, they pop up on our bookshelves every few years to bring forth a new set of ‘what if’ questions.
Dystopia is a fine word, concentrated and resonant, for society gone wrong. We like to think that complexity (of politics, economics, technology, religion, demographics) means there are now more ways than ever in which society can go wrong. But that was also the perception in the past – in the the eighteenth century (Swift, Hogarth), the nineteenth (Dickens, Dostoevsky, Zola), and the early twentieth (Fritz Lang, Brecht, Orwell, Kafka, Huxley). Dystopia has always been a literary theme and a philosophical perception, but it didn’t always have such a good label.