by Jean-Paul L. Garnier
Samantha Mills is a Nebula, Locus, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award winning author living in Southern California, USA. You can find her short fiction in Uncanny Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, and others, as well as the best-of anthologies The New Voices of Science Fiction and The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2023. Her debut science fantasy novel, The Wings Upon Her Back, is out now. You can find more at www.samtasticbooks.com.
JPG – The culture in The Wings Upon Her Back is a theocracy where labor and religion are intertwined, can you tell us about using this as a worldbuilding device?
SM – When developing The Wings Upon Her Back, I wanted a claustrophobic, monocultural setting to reflect the isolation of the main character and the fraught history of her city. Everything had to revolve around the five gods that are sleeping overhead.
In the book, the division of labor is a core tenet of their religious and social framework because they are emulating the gods, who arrived with very clearly defined roles. I ended up with five sects: the workers and farmers are the biggest groups, who keep the city running; the scholars and engineers are documenting and implementing the teachings of the gods; and the warriors keep the city isolated from outside forces. The primary conflict of the book comes from the unbalancing of these factions, as the warriors take more power over the others.
One of my favorite worldbuilding techniques is to build out social expectations – what everyone is supposed to believe, what everyone is supposed to do – and then to imagine the characters who do not fit the mold. I set a limit at five sects because it automatically creates tension: you can’t actually sort the breadth of humanity or the tasks needed to keep society running into such a small number of categories!
This tension permeates the book. There are jobs, such as medicine, that rely on teachings from multiple gods, and therefore arouse some unease. And there are many individuals who don’t fit neatly into their sect. My main character, Zemolai, was born into a family of scholars, but left them to be a warrior. The hodgepodge group of rebels she falls in with later in life have all either changed sects, or are revolting against the expectations placed on workers specifically. The right to question the division of labor (and therefore, the teachings of the gods) is central to the story.
JPG – How did your background in Library Science influence your writing of the Scholar Sect and their relationship to documents and research?
SM – I definitely drew on some of the ideals of the archival profession to develop the scholars. Their purpose is to pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge. They desire to understand as much of their past as possible, and to make those works accessible to anyone who is interested, and that puts them at odds with an administration that is more concerned with controlling the national narrative. It isn’t just about the right to preserve these texts, but the right to publish them and share them.
A major conflict starts in the book because one of the lead scholars orders a cataloguing project, and in the course of going through the archives item by item, a student comes across a heretical document that was thought to be destroyed. It’s also really easy to keep it hidden because collections like this are so vast that a couple sheets of paper filed in the wrong spot are missing for good. (Ask me how I know!) The subplot that unspools from this discovery is a fight over censorship, free speech, the freedom to read without government interference or surveillance—all perennially relevant topics for librarians!
JPG – In the book, myth and history are blurred together in ways that affect the people’s understanding of their place in the world, sometimes leading to confusion, what inspired this and do you think this also becomes an issue in our “non-fictional” world?
SM – This is also directly tied to my experience as an archivist. I spend a lot of time thinking about how we preserve history. Archives have limited space and they develop narrow collection guidelines in order to prioritize what to keep. It creates these pockets of history— specialists who know the nuance of one community or time period really well. You’ll have a city’s primary history museum displaying a timeline of major events. And then you’ll have these little historical societies collecting the papers of smaller communities that the museum didn’t have room for, and you get an entirely different perspective on the same time period.
It’s the big picture history that’s always been a problem. It’s impossible to teach the full range of human experience across all time. And so, history is always oversimplified. It’s divided into coherent chapters in textbooks. If you get twenty pages on the Industrial Revolution, it’s going to include only the most pivotal dates, the biggest names, and broad generalizations about what life was like. But at no point in history did everyone in a society have the same background, the same experiences, the same beliefs. There is always more complexity.
I believe that the history we teach is always mythologized. We tell the tales of Great Men (some Great Women lately, too), and we tell our history like it’s a narrative of linear progress that led directly to the present day. This also means our history changes over time, as our understanding of it changes. Every new generation of researchers looks back and finds details that were left out of the main narrative, and that can be very confusing. It can leave people disoriented and defensive and arguing that it has to be fake because it doesn’t match the history they learned in school. But the history they know is already a story, and there are always more stories.
JPG – Much of the conflict for the protagonist arises from a sense of duty to one’s family versus duty to one’s profession and sect, and the compromises that arise from that conflict. Tell us about using this device as a source of drama?
SM – I really wanted to explore the parallels between dictatorial rule and abusive relationship dynamics, and one of the primary modes of control in both those cases is to isolate one’s target. For a nation, this may present as closed borders, perpetual war, whipping up fear about inside and outside threats. For an individual, this means isolating the victim from friends, family, or any other type of support network that might provide an outside perspective.
In the book, the primary antagonist is the leader of the warrior sect, Vodaya. She is an abusive figure who believes not just in the supremacy of the warriors, but of herself. She can’t tolerate any dissent. When the primary conflict of the novel kicks off, Zemolai’s family is on the opposite side. The scholars are fighting for free speech and the right to question the gods, while the warriors are fighting for control and the fulfillment of their god’s edicts. I took the abuse narrative and raised the stakes— Vodaya literally turns Zemolai’s family into enemies of the state, and Zemolai is caught between her love for her family and her utter belief in the ideals of her profession and mentor.
JPG – In grand SFF tradition, the chapters all begin with excerpts from fictious books and documents. Were these written as part of the chapters, or did you plan out the text and write them separately, and has your work as a librarian inspired this cross referencing of text?
SM – These came surprisingly late in my drafting process! In the first few drafts, the subplot about heretical works in the archives was not as prominent as it became in the end. I was primarily focused on the main two timelines – Zemolai as a youth getting caught up in a fascist movement, and Zemolai as an adult coming to terms with what happened to her and how she can make amends for it.
It was when I started doing more theme work, about history repeating itself, cycles of intergenerational trauma, and so on, that I developed a third story about all of this happening generations earlier. The disillusionment that Zemolai experiences mirrors the history of the city feeling abandoned by its gods. I decided to slip this third story in via chapter epigraphs and interludes because I love that sort of thing, and I wrote it all in the style of documents I might find in an old collection. Some are only fragments, some pieces have no attribution, and there are clearly missing pieces. We never get the full story in my line of work—just tantalizing glimpses of the past, which we serve up on a platter for researchers and then hope they can piece the clues together!
JPG – My favorite character, if I can call it a character, is the God-tree. Can you tell us about this element of the book, what inspired it, and how it works?
SM – One of the great things about science fantasy is you get some wiggle room to ask – is it magic or is it technology? In this book, the gods are gods of knowledge and technology. Their gifts sometimes come in the form of schematics. But the humans they inspired were villagers with a far simpler society. In developing the religion, I tried to create symbolism that would exist between these two modes. These are ordinary people trying to comprehend more advanced beings.
Because the gods are physically accessible—sleeping above the city, with the portals to their realm visible in the sky—their devoted followers were able to build towers to reach them. These towers are haphazard in appearance. The building materials are different every few floors, as they either ran out of supplies or developed better construction plans.
They designed buildings that were twenty-five stories tall. Five sets of five. I liked the idea of the mecha god’s tower being just short of the portal. And being as devoted as they are, they weren’t going to just plop a lackluster ladder on the roof. They planted this glorious tree instead, which reflects the strange foliage that exists on the other side. And every time the god’s hand comes through, it chars the tree.
There are hints in the epigraphs that the first followers who reached the portals bashed themselves against it, many dying, until one of the gods woke up, took pity on them, and provided instructions on how to get in safely. That technology was then built into the tree. The leader of the sect connects to the equipment with a mechanical cord and says the words given by the gods, and that command activates the portal opening. They do not know whether it is magic or technology. They only know that it works.
JPG – The Wings Upon Her Back is your debut novel, but you’ve also been successful as a writer of short fiction. How does the process of writing short versus long form differ for you, and do you have a preference depending on what kind of story you want to tell?
SM – I actually wrote books before I learned to write short stories! The process is similar. When I have an idea, I take notes on paper. At that stage the idea still feels malleable. I can brainstorm all I want and it doesn’t matter if the details are contradictory because it’s just brainstorming. When I think I have a clear enough idea on the setting, characters, and main plot points, I’ll move my notes to the computer, leaving out anything that doesn’t fit with the rest.
If it’s a short story, I’ll just arrange those notes chronologically and start drafting. It’s short enough that I can fill in the blanks as I go. And then I edit it three thousand times to tighten the language and the scene transitions to get it as sleek as I possibly can.
For a book, there are too many threads for me to dive in right away. I need the beginning, the end, and what order the major turning points need to happen. Then I start filling in the blanks in an outline, deciding how my characters are going to get from turning point A to turning point B, and so on. I layer in some notes about character development. I work backward from the end and drop tentative suggestions of where the setup needs to happen to make that ending possible.
And then once I’m drafting, I find all sorts of new problems and plot holes and missing pieces, and I’ll keep a running document of things I need to fix or add in edits. I focus on getting one draft down, and then I have a bunch of puzzle pieces to play with in draft two.
I would say that I turn to short stories when I want to try an experimental format. My short stories are often the climax of a character arc, with backstory and worldbuilding sprinkled around it in interesting ways. I turn to novels when I want to explore more facets of the main idea, which means a fuller cast of characters with differing goals and more focus on what they learn along the way.
JPG – What are you currently working on and what’s coming up next for you?
SM – I have two top secret short story projects that I am working on this summer! I’ll be very excited to share more details when I can.
I’ve also been editing a new novel. I’m calling it The Secret Sea Monster WIP. It’s my favorite thing I’ve written in a long time. I think it has a good blend of the meaty theme work that folks have been enjoying in The Wings Upon Her Back, combined with a bit more humor and a ragtag group of characters trying to escape an infamous prison island that is surrounded by sea monsters. Hopefully I can get that in front of editors later this year. Cross your fingers for me!
Jean-Paul L. Garnier is the owner of Space Cowboy Books, producer of Simultaneous Times Podcast (2023 Laureate Award Winner, BSFA Finalist), and editor of the SFPA’s Star*Line magazine. He is also the deputy editor-in-chief of Worlds of IF magazine & the soon to be relaunched Galaxy magazine. He has written many books of poetry and science fiction. https://spacecowboybooks.com/
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