Tired of fantasy books steeped in sexism: Samantha Shannon

Shannon tells on how she has had men tell her to her face that they don't read books by women and how women still face various hurdles in the fantasy genre.

On the sidelines of the fourth installment of her international bestselling Bone Season series, Samantha Shannon tells Medha Dutta Yadav how women still face various hurdles in the fantasy genre and how she has had men tell her to her face that they don't read books by women. An excerpt:

Your heroine, Paige Mahoney, is wonderful, but at the same time deeply flawed. Tell us more how you fleshed out her character.

I love telling the story through Paige's eyes. It’s such a privilege to be able to stay with one character across a long series, to have the liberty of slowly layering and growing her personality in response to her experiences.

I knew a lot about who Paige was when her voice first came to me in 2011. I knew she was going to be proud, guarded, a little more fragile than she lets on, but she’s still taken me by surprise with her resilience and compassion over the years. She does have her flaws, including an opportunism that tips into recklessness, but I wouldn’t find her relatable or interesting without them. A perfect character is usually a dull one.

How difficult was it building a completely 'outworldly world', packed with characters and their histories?

World-building isn't that difficult for me. I'm fortunate that I have a good memory and I can visualise what I'm creating and describing, which makes it easier. I enjoy working out fine details, but I also love the challenge of crafting larger concepts like governments, histories, religions and magic systems. Every element of the world-building process holds some appeal for me.

How many years of research went into the series?

The research never stopped… eight years and counting. The groundwork - looking into different kinds of historical divination, threading them all into a magic system, working out the basics of the clairvoyant underworld and how one city would differ from the other - took a few weeks and continued as I drafted the first installment.

I was already very familiar with Oxford, studying there at the time. The Mime Order is set in London, where I’ve been based all my life, so that wasn’t too much work, either. But The Song Rising and The Mask Falling take place in Manchester, Edinburgh and Paris, where I’ve never lived, so they required more geographical fact-finding.

Sometimes you drop the reader right in the midst of all the action, without a lot of explanation. Is that a way to make your created world feel more lived-in and real?

I do try to give the reader enough context to understand and care about what's happening, but sometimes that can feel artificial, especially if the character is already familiar with a world. One thing I've learned since my debut is that readers can sometimes find too much explanation overwhelming. Fantasy readers, especially, are used to new concepts, and are largely willing to trust the author and go along with what they don’t understand for a while, knowing they’ll adjust to it.

Did you ever feel that too much of blood and violence, and betrayal might put off some readers?

I’m aware that some content may put readers off, as we all have different tolerance levels - I personally find graphic sexual assault very difficult, for example. No book will appeal to everyone. Having said that, the grim and the dark remain popular, so I assume many readers don’t find it off-putting.

The Bone Season is mostly less bloody and violent than, say, A Song of Ice and Fire or Nevernight by Jay Kristoff, which have both enjoyed great success.

Has feminism always been at the core of your stories?

I've always been drawn to writing from a woman's perspectives and building worlds in which women are equal. I get tired of reading fantasy books that are steeped in sexism. It can get dispiriting to see the mistreatment and subjugation of women even in the genre that's meant to help us escape reality.

There must always be room to explore real-world issues in speculative fiction, as it can provide an effective mirror, but in my view, it shouldn't be the default setting for any genre. There should be some imagined worlds where female characters face and overcome sexism, but also some where they don’t have to deal with it at all.

As a child did you grow up with fantasy fiction?

I read a fair amount of contemporary fiction when I was young, such as Jacqueline Wilson and Malorie Blackman’s books, but I also grew up with Harry Potter, The Worst Witch by Jill Murphy, Dragon Rider by Cornelia Funke, and Sabriel by Garth Nix.

Is fantasy still largely a male-dominated genre?

No way. I don’t think it ever was. Women have been creating and consuming speculative fiction for as long as it’s existed. Some of the most innovative and talented fantasy writers alive today are women: Jeannette Ng, Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Laini Taylor, Melinda Salisbury, Nghi Vo, NK Jemisin, RF Kuang, Tasha Suri, VE Schwab and Zen Cho, to name but a handful.

What next?

I’m currently rounding off a first draft of a project related to The Priory of the Orange Tree. After that I’ll be jumping into the fifth Bone Season book.