Lilith Saintcrow: Sorcery, logic, deduction, odd bedfellows, loyalty, betrayal, tea, and the problem of reliably finding hansom cabs.

DF: And a little about yourself.

LS: I’m really very boring. I write, feed my kids and animals, write obsessively, and read just as obsessively. I do like long walks on the beach, am neutral on the subject of pina coladas, and I prepare for the zombie apocalypse on a daily basis.

DF: The thing about Lili is she makes “boring” fascinating. Check out her blog for all sorts of smart discussion. If I name a fantasy subgenre, you’ve probably written it, and you’ve done a lot with vampires and werewolves. Why Steampunk? And how does your experience in those genres shape your Steampunk?

LS: I actually view Steampunk as more of an aesthetic than a full-blown genre, and I never intended to even get close to writing it or writing anything to do with the Victorian era. Other historical eras interested me far more. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending) Archibald Clare had other ideas. I originally thought he would be the sole main character, but then the sorceress Miss Bannon began speaking too, and the difference between them was so interesting I kept writing to find out what would happen next. Genre is a funny beast. On the one hand, a story is a story, and genre is the lens we choose to tell and see a story through. On the other, each genre has a set of conventions–walls in the maze one has to solve in order to tell the story, if you will. Using those walls to propel a reader through the story, or tunneling under them just enough to change the shape of the maze a little, is where the fun lies. So I view each genre as sort of like its own playground, with different structures and rules. It’s always recess, you just have to figure out each playground’s rules of engagement.

LS: Well, it started out as my homage to Sherlock Holmes. Growing up I loved Holmes and Encyclopedia Brown, those sorts of stories–the idea that one could observe so closely and make logical deductions, or find the thing that didn’t fit, was like a superpower an ordinary person could acquire through practice. But of course almost every story I write has a supernatural element, for whatever reason. It’s hard to say “choices” in this situation, because it feels more like excavating a world that’s already there than making decisions. Certain things grew out of my understanding of Victorian attitudes, other things grew out of research, still others were fortunate accidents arriving from that fugue state where a writer just grabs a thread from the tapestry and pulls to find out where it goes.

LS:They introduced themselves with their names full-blown, actually. I can’t pick a favourite–on the one hand, I like Emma because she’s so very strong and fragile all at once, and the tension between what’s expected of her as a woman in that time period and society versus the fact of her sorcerous talent and will makes her fascinating. Archibald, on the other hand, is a far more approachable character, despite the fact that his brain is built for logic and deduction. He has trouble with his emotions, and that difficulty makes him very human for me, much easier to identify with than Emma.

I have to say that my favourite characters are often secondary. In this case, Sigmund Baerbarth the half-failed genius sort of bloomed and took over a far larger role than I thought he would, and I enjoyed to the hilt every scene he arrived in. So as far as who I most enjoyed out of this particular book, it’s him. In the second Bannon & Clare book, Red Plague Affair, I think my favourite character is a hunchback. So you never can tell.

LS: I have two more Bannon & Clare books; we’ll see what happens after that. The next, as I’ve said, is Red Plague, and it grew out of the historical facts of the 1854 cholera outbreak in London. Plague and epidemiology fascinate me; human responses to mass outbreaks and bioweapons fascinate me too, in a sort of unhealthy trainwreck way. So that was all boiling inside my head while writing it.

It’s actually the book afterward, though, where things get really interesting…

LS:Right now the question I’m rarely asked is about writing women in quasi-historical settings. There’s a certain amount of tension there. Women have gotten the short end of the stick historically, and it’s important to be honest about that. But using misogyny in history for shock-jock value or to propagate current misogynistic attitudes is repugnant in the extreme.

I’m often annoyed by anachronistic attitudes in plenty of historical fiction; far more interesting in my mind is to show historical attitudes one may not agree with and to show their flaws and (dubious) merits clearly. Of course every work of historical or futuristic fiction really says far more about the author’s present than anything else. It’s a balancing act, and one I wish more interviewers asked about, because I think each author’s individual answer for each individual book would be absolutely fascinating to hear about and discuss.

LS: Thank you for having me!

Didn’t I tell you guys she was awesome? I may have been a little giddy when she agreed to the interview. So, why are you still here? Go forth and read some Steampunk!