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- [00:01]
Dr. Lisa
This summer. Say I do.
- [00:02]
Marie Brennan
I am marrying a stranger like never before.
- [00:05]
AE Lanier
Am I crazy?
- [00:06]
Dr. Lisa
It's a whole new Married at First Sight on Peacock. Thank God I woke up in love with new experts. My name is Dr. Lisa.
- [00:13]
Alyss Helms
My name is Paul Brunson.
- [00:14]
Dr. Lisa
Lord Couples, this could be the start of a very successful marriage and more surprises.
- [00:19]
Marie Brennan
Or maybe not.
- [00:20]
Alyss Helms
Everything is just not enough. You're a little bit crazy.
- [00:23]
Dr. Lisa
I don't know what's gonna happen.
- [00:25]
AE Lanier
I want my fairytale ending.
- [00:27]
Dr. Lisa
Married at first sight streaming July 12th only on Peacock.
- [00:31]
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- [01:00]
Dr. Lisa
this summer, Prime Video takes you back before Legally Blonde, before law school, and into the world of Elle woods in high school. Set in 1995, this Gemini vegetarian knows exactly who she is until her family moves from Bel Air to Seattle. Packed with iconic fashion, 90s nostalgia and a throwback soundtrack, Elle proves one Law school was hard. High school was harder. From the world of Legally Blonde, watch Elle, a new original series only on Prime Video. Watch now.
- [01:30]
Marie Brennan
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:35]
AE Lanier
Hello and welcome to New Books and Fantasy. I am your host, AE Lanier. Today I will be speaking with MA Carrick about their novel the Eye of Leviathan. The opening book of their new duology, the Eye of Leviathan, begins with a deal between Teresa, wife of an abusive hidalgo, and her friend, the fairy Castiana, who agrees to become a changeling taking the form of an infant boy and the place of Teresa's sixth daughter, who will instead be raised by fairies. Teresa gets protection for a child that would otherwise be killed and Castiana, now Estevan, gets access to the human world, where he can hopefully learn enough to stop the increasing violence against his people. Set in Spain in the early 1600s, the Inquisition and European colonization play central parts in the novel. The Eye of Leviathan imagines a world where Spain focuses not on the Americas as its primary target for colonization, but on the sea beyond the realm of the fae. The story follows Esteban, now a changeling, as he struggles to navigate life, passing as human during a time of great political change and violence, and the child he has replaced, known as the hungry Girl, a young woman who has been sent far beyond the grove on her mother's lands, where she was intended to grow up. Ma Carrick is the joint pen name of Marie Brennan, author of the memoirs of Lady Trent, and Alyss Helms, the author of the Adventures of Mr. Mystic. This is their second project together after forming the pen name to collaborate on the Rook and Rose Trilogy. They are here with us now. Hey, y'. All, it's great to have you.
- [03:04]
Alyss Helms
Good to be back. Hey, it's great to be here. Thanks.
- [03:07]
Marie Brennan
Yeah, I'm Marie Brennan. You already mentioned the author of the Memoirs of Lady Trent and various other series and short stories and poems. I am the M of the Ma in Ma Carrick.
- [03:18]
Alyss Helms
And I am Alice Helms, the A of Ma Carrick and author of Far Less Than Marie. But I feel like we make up for in quality with the Rook and Rose trilogy and now the Stevion Duology. What I lack in something, if we
- [03:37]
Marie Brennan
keep writing fat books, it's going to add up to a comparable word count.
- [03:40]
AE Lanier
So, yeah, I feel like your word count is still objectively intimidating, Alyss, even if it's not. Like, if we all compare ourselves to Marie, then, you know, yeah, this is a very intimidating person. Could y' all start off speaking a little bit about the setting and what drew you to this time and place for your new project?
- [03:59]
Marie Brennan
I blame Elys,
- [04:02]
Alyss Helms
actually. It is entirely Marie's fault. So I feel like this needs a bit of an origin story, which is that after we finish the Rick and Rose trilogy, we were pitching ideas to our editor, and the first idea we pitched, she came back and was like, you know, we really want to work with you, you two, again, but we want something more commercial. And Marie and I kind of looked at each other and went, what the heck does that mean? Like, we do not know what is commercial. Nobody really does. But it kind of almost cynically, I. I was thinking about this, you know, commercial. Commercial. What's commercial? And I was thinking about, you know, I follow, you know, booktok, Bookstagram, booktube, you know, these places. And at the time, it was, you know, fall of 23, and I was like, what's really commercial right now? And I came up with these kind of four pillars. It was romantasy, cozy, dark academia, and fairies. And I was like, I am going to come up with the most romantasy, cozy, dark academia fairy idea I can possibly come up with, you know, and there I'll be totally commercial. And. But I was thinking also, okay, but I'VE also got to get Marie on board with this idea. I gotta be able to hook her. And at the time, she was really getting into map making. And I was like, okay, maps. She's really into maps. I can get her with maps. And I was thinking, the map is not the territory that that quote. And I was like, okay, but what if it was? What if you could, you know, map territories and actually map fantasy, like, lands and worlds, like, and actually drag them into reality and thereby, you know, exploit them and. And do terrible things. So I sent this kind of vibes description of what I was thinking off to Marie, and then she's really the one who kind of grounded us in time and place, so I'll let her take on the story from there.
- [06:04]
Marie Brennan
Yeah, it was, you know, talking Alyssa initially and just spitballing this thing was like this character, Etienne, and just like, threw that name out there. And I was like, okay, well, Etienne, France. France did, you know, do colonization and such. But if we're talking about something where you're trying to, like, map a fairy otherworld or, like, these magical lands and control them through the mapping, that sounds like a little bit earlier, more sort of like the initial age of exploration, at which point you're really talking a lot about Portugal and Spain. And, well, neither of us is fluent in Spanish, but we at least speak some of it, which is more than I can say for Portuguese. So we look at Spade, and I thought, well, 1492 is sitting right there. Now, to be clear, we want to be very, very straightforward about this. This is not replacing the colonization of the New World. We just have an alternate history where it's running a bit differently. And the colonization of the sea beyond is running in parallel with what happened to the Americas, because we didn't want to do the kind of story where we erased that and replaced it with something. But, yeah, I guess it is my fault that we're in Spain. It's Alyssa's fault that we're doing this story in the first place. Though fair warning, if you're looking for the cozy and romantasy parts of it, like, we tried to sell out and we failed. Alyssa attempted to come up with the most crassly commercial idea they could. We managed fairies, and we've got a little bit of dark academia in there. Like, especially there's a bit of the. The novel that takes place at the University of Salamanca. But other than that, mostly we have fairies for you do not look for.
- [07:34]
Alyss Helms
Yeah, we missed most of the targets that we aimed for, but, you know, we got the fairies in. Yeah.
- [07:40]
Marie Brennan
So our motto is apparently, aim to sell out and miss.
- [07:42]
Alyss Helms
Yeah.
- [07:43]
AE Lanier
I feel like the point at which you've grounded in the Inquisition and early European colonization makes the whole is. Is very far afield from cozy.
- [07:52]
Marie Brennan
Yeah, I think if you did that
- [07:54]
Alyss Helms
cozy, it would be really.
- [07:56]
AE Lanier
Exactly.
- [07:57]
Marie Brennan
I mean, I. I already have some trouble with a few cozy books that I feel like they'll put something in there. And I go, you're really just not looking at the implications of that thing you tossed in there because it would ruin your cozy vibe. So, yeah, don't look for us because.
- [08:11]
Alyss Helms
And while there. There are kind of whispers of romance, especially, you know, the further on you get. Because I think Marie and I both are very much grounded in character relationships, whether they be, you know, romantic relationships or, you know, filial or what have you. And so, you know, we have all sorts of interesting relationships between the characters, but it's not romantasy.
- [08:38]
AE Lanier
Yeah.
- [08:38]
Marie Brennan
It's not the driving engine of the story. It is there, but it's not the central centerpiece of the whole thing.
- [08:43]
AE Lanier
Absolutely. I was wondering if we could talk a little bit more about sort of this idea of mapping and pinning in place and the logistics of the way that the Sea beyond works and the ways that that allows you. Because this book is very interesting in that it is talking about early European colonization and is very honest about the violence and the tactics and things like that. But you're doing it simultaneously in a space where you aren't. Right. You aren't talking about the peoples for whom this actually happened and that trauma, but you are talking about sort of the tactics and the cultures that created this genocidal violence. So I was wondering if you could talk a little about sort of the magic logistics and also how you thought about that.
- [09:26]
Marie Brennan
Yeah, we definitely wanted to ground it not just in history, but in at least certain aspects of kind of traditional fairy lore and ideas about it. And so that includes things, for starters, like you've already mentioned the Inquisition. You can't talk about fairies in Europe without talking about religion. Like, those things have always had interplay with each other. And so we had to start off with, like, okay, well, if people know the Sea beyond exists, if this is not like a secret thing, but an open fact that everybody knows about it, then theology is going to have to have an answer to where does that fit into the cosmology? And it's not going to be a friendly answer for Catholicism. And then the sea beyond itself, we wanted to play with all of those Myths and legends about, like, the magical western seas that are full of all kinds of stuff. So you get it in, like the Odyssey, you get it. There's Imran, a genre of Celtic tales that are sailing off into the western seas and finding mythical islands. But often there are things where it's not like you can put it on a map. People tried. They were like, oh, I found high Brazil. It's right here. But then somebody else sails there and it's not there. Right. And the time slippage where somebody can go in and they think only a year has passed and they come out and it's a hundred years later or the other way around. So that was kind of the interesting logistical part that the New World. I mean, mapping even an actual island or continent that stays in place was not easy because at the time they didn't have a good way to measure longitude and even latitude. Like, we could measure it, but not super accurately. And so you would chart an island and you might be off by like 200 miles, which is a long distance. Like, somebody else sails through there, they do not find the island. They think it's moved. No, it's just your measurements were inaccurate. So it wasn't easy even in the real world. But see, beyond, we wanted to play with that. Like, okay, the islands move and time is not reliable. And so the process of colonizing the sea beyond isn't just about, like, conquering people and so on, but also about literally figuring out how to fix the islands in place and fix them in time so that they can be reliably exploited. Because if they migrate and you don't know where they went, you can't really
- [11:34]
Alyss Helms
do much with them. Yeah, and I would say the, the other thing that, you know, when we were thinking about, you know, how we were approaching not just history, but the. The kind of the entire milieu that we're dealing with. You're talking about a time when, you know, like, the writings of Sir John Mandeville are, are hugely influencing how people are imagining the world. These writings are hugely affecting how people imagine the world and how people imagine how big the world is and how much there might be out there, you know, and a time when the, the popularity of, you know, the Alexander romance, the chivalric romances, this, you know, idea of, you know, these kinds of big quests are very impactful. And so kind of between, like, the travel writing genre that's kind of going on, then the mythology of, you know, kind of Greece and Roman mythology and the Alexander mythology and all of these other Kind of, you know, travel mythologies. We've got a very rich corpus to draw from that. I don't often see people who are writing, you know, fairy stories, you know, and, and, you know, writing these fairy mythologies really dig into, you know, the, the, the. The kind of fairy stories that you tend to get in fantasy are. Are very. Tend to be very bounded in a certain kind of idea of fairies in the British Isles or something like that. And so we were really eager to play with a much larger palette of things that we could draw in and draw upon. You've also got all of the Abrahamic mythologies from the Abrahamic religions and the apocryphal books. Like, you know, the Book of Enoch is very important. And so we have a lot of. I don't want to say fun, but we had a lot of fun. Like, I'm going to make Marie talk about her murder board. Her cosmological murder board. Yeah.
- [13:35]
Marie Brennan
So I, I have two documents in our shared folder. One is labeled Cosmological Murderboard, and the other is labeled Historical Murderboard. The cosmological one is the really unhinged one. It's just a text document. But if you're thinking of that image from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia with the guy with the board and the red strings, and, you know, he's holding forth on his conspiracy theory, it has that vibe. Because what we found when we started digging into both, like, the religious and the more secularly folkloric stuff is especially in the Mediterranean, which is this area where, like, the European coast and the African coast and the, like, near east, these all influenced each other constantly. You can't tug on one thread without accidentally pulling, like, six related things with it. And so we ran with this idea that kind of all of those things are true, even if they contradict themselves a little bit. Like our entrance to the sea beyond, you get there by passing through the Strait of Gibralt, which mythically was spoken of as the pillars of Hercules. One pillar is the Rock of Gibraltar. The other one, it's a little more debatable. On the African side, there's not quite as clear of a landmark there, but there was supposedly a phrase written on them non plus ultra, like, nothing more beyond that. That was basically the end of the world. Obviously it isn't. There's Britain out, like, in those waters and other things, but that's your entrance to the sea beyond. And there's contradictory stories of did Hercules split apart a mountain into two to let the sea through, or did he pull two mountains together to close it off a strait, whereas before it had been open. And Hercules actually connects a lot with Samson in the Bible, including with the temple of the Philistines. Did he bring it down by pushing the pillars apart or by yanking them together? And Hercules also connects to the Phoenician Melqart. And then sooner or later we're like winding up on the Epic of Gilgamesh and just we find ourselves like all
- [15:25]
Alyss Helms
of a sudden, whoa.
- [15:26]
Marie Brennan
The Bull of Heaven is like wandering into our story here. Like we had, I'm absolutely going to say we had fun grabbing all of these interrelated pieces and going, yes, yes, everything connects to everything else. I'm getting crazy eyes.
- [15:39]
Alyss Helms
Yeah. And, and I think the fun thing for us about it, and you know, you got this with our magic systems and, and some of our world building and mythology building in Rick and Rose, but I think you get it even more here because in Rick and Rose we had to make some kind of nod to, to like reducing the structure down to something that was vaguely streamlined and coherent. But the great thing about real world mythology is that nothing, like nothing is a one to one mapping. Like, you know, it isn't this is this is this is this, it's this is kind of this. But there's also elements of this. And then you bring this in, it's much more messier. And we both like that mess. Like we tried to bring a bit of that mess into the magic systems and the world building of Rook and Rose. But the fact that we're dealing with real world mythologies and real world histories and stuff like that means that we can embrace that mess and really play with it a lot more. And we don't have to have it be absolutely streamlined, absolutely mechanical. Absolutely. This is this is this, which I think tends to be a push towards a lot of magic systems of world buildings to make them make absolute logical sense. When people don't work that way, mythologies don't work that way. And in the real world history, you get to actually indulge in that. I, I, I, I've mentioned before that if Rook and Rose was us playing, you know, when anthropologists attack, then this, you know, the sea beyond is us playing. When, when folklorists get to play in
- [17:15]
Marie Brennan
the mud, we're just splacking around making a giant mess everywhere.
- [17:19]
Alyss Helms
We're just splashing around, we're throwing mud pies at each other and having a great time.
- [17:25]
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- [18:49]
AE Lanier
so we have two POV characters in this story. We start with our changeling, Esteban. Could y' all talk a little bit about sort of him and his goals for the novel as essentially like our initial mover in the story.
- [19:04]
Alyss Helms
So, so Esteban was, was there. He was the seed. He was there at the very beginning, like the moment I was like, you know, oh, you know, the map, not the territory. And like there's, I, I, I was like, you know, there's some kind of like, changeling character who is, you know, knows about all of this colonization and all these horrible things that are happening to fairies. And he's, he's, you know, makes this deal to try to infiltrate the institutions of power that are, you know, doing this, to try to find out the secret of these magics, of how they're doing it and, and stop them somehow. And as Marie said earlier, you know, I kind of had named him Etienne in, in my initial kind of, you know, brain spurge. And it was, I think her idea to that, that his was his story was only half of the story. But yeah, that is definitely Estevan's kind of driving goal is he's, you know, he's a, a, a very small kind of diminished fairy who, who lives in, you know, is stuck in the Mortal world rather than the more magical, you know, still thriving sea beyond and, you know, has this small foothold into a much larger, you know, mortal kind of existence that he then builds on and builds on and builds on. And I think kind of, because he's essentially like a kind of a, A nature tree grove kind of creature, he has the patience to play the long game and see it through. And I think that's.
- [20:38]
Marie Brennan
Oh, he does. Initially he's complaining to Torres.
- [20:40]
AE Lanier
What do you mean?
- [20:41]
Marie Brennan
I've already been here eight years and I'm an eight year old boy. What do you mean? I can't do everything yet?
- [20:46]
Alyss Helms
Yeah, that's true. He develops the patience to see it through. He grows into it.
- [20:52]
Marie Brennan
Yeah, we did have fun because even though we knew it was going to make a bit of a slower start to the book, we wanted to show some portion of him growing up because there's just so much comedy potential inherent in being a fairy who's like, okay, mortal world, let's go. What. What is all of this? I don't understand. None of you people make sense. Fairy weirdness makes far more sense than mortals do. So we didn't want to look or
- [21:17]
Alyss Helms
making that outsider observance of the world of. This is. This is just as strange as fairy stuff. But you all think it makes sense. What is the difference between a robe and a dress? You know, why tell, like, explain to me this, like, virgin birth again, all of that kind of stuff.
- [21:35]
AE Lanier
Yeah, well, it's such an interesting in as well, because obviously we as the reader are learning a lot about the culture as well.
- [21:43]
Lululemon Advertiser
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- [21:43]
AE Lanier
Like, most of your readers are probably not super familiar with the Spain in 1590. And so it lets us with the characters, learn about theology, learn about gender, learn about all of these things. And y' all already spoken a little bit about the dark academia vibes. One of the things for me, right, like, I'm a middle school teacher, so I'm terribly biased. But getting to watch Estevan, who knows that he needs an education to be able to get into the rooms that he would like to be in, attempting to navigate, being able to get that education and also seeing like, what that system would be like for like a real human child who is not going to be necessarily capable of thinking of the level of foresight and things like that, because that's how children are. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about sort of the different educational systems and all of that fun research and world building that you get to show off.
- [22:34]
Marie Brennan
Yeah, I had fun doing the Research into education. Even if, like, still at this point, I don't feel like I can quite wrap my brain around it. And it's partly a difference in time period, but it's also, I think that I'm American and I think certain parts of it would have clicked for me better if I were a Brit, because the British, like Oxbert marriage system is in some ways closer to the way that it worked in Salamanca. But, yeah, it's the setup where, okay, you, if you're reasonably well off, like, you, you know, maybe have a private tutor, but then we, for reasons of plot, managed to stick a Savon into one of the grammar schools that existed at the time, where literally, like, there were separate fees if you were going to be paid not only to read, but also to write. And then if your parents could afford it, you'll also be taught how to do basic arithmetic. Like, we're in a different world.
- [23:23]
Alyss Helms
There's.
- [23:24]
Marie Brennan
And then he gets to Salamanca and there's parts of it that are very different from what a modern person is used to and parts of it that are familiar because, like, the tenured professors who held chairs there often were, like, somewhere else trying to get some kind of political appointment that would pay them better. And so they basically, like, shove their work off onto, effectively, adjunct faculty. I'm like, oh, that doesn't feel at
- [23:48]
Alyss Helms
all unlike very poorly paid adjunct faculty.
- [23:52]
Marie Brennan
Yes, yeah, exactly. So, like, some things seem very familiar and some are very weird. And the, the piece of trivia I've been trotting out for, you know, interviews and, and we put it in our author's note because this is just so bizarre to me. I'm reading this, like, thick. We're talking 3 inches thick volume of scholarly articles on the university in early modern Europe. And I'm hunting down all the bits where it mentions Salamanca. And I hit this moment where it explains that for the relatively small number of people who went for a doctoral degree, you weren't considered to have really achieved your degree until you killed a bull in a corrida, a bull fight, and used its blood to paint your name on the walls of the town. And I hit this. I'm like, this is the Tumblr thing about the snake fighting portion of your thesis defense. But it's real and it's a bull, and it's a bull. When we've got a whole cosmology that we built up for this duology around Leviathan and Behemoth, and Behemoth is often depicted as a bull. I'm like, okay, we have got to get the bullfighting scene in there, but also we have justification because we can bring in behemoth stuff when we do it, but it's really going in here because it's insane. And, like, can you imagine if getting your degree at a university now required a bullfight?
- [25:05]
AE Lanier
It's just a very different skill set. It's a very high risk. You just did a lot of work, and it's a very high risk task.
- [25:13]
Marie Brennan
Bullcounting was a little different at the time, but it was still extremely high risk, as we show there. But it was kind of bound up in the fact that bullfighting was a thing that was often done by nobles at the time. And if you got a doctoral degree, you were effectively counted as a noble. And so, like, it. It makes. And you can't say my little scare quotes sense kind of, but it's also bonkers. So, yeah, I had fun digging into academia and finding things like that and just stuff you wouldn't expect. Like, the Jesuit schools for, like, earlier education were considered very, very good. And the students would put on all of these plays about classical mythology. But you're at a Jesuit school. Yeah. You're still staging classical myths. Okay, sure.
- [25:55]
Alyss Helms
And. And kind of like you were saying, Angela, it. It. It's fun research. It's. It's fun little details, and it also gives us a chance to kind of train the reader up in, here's our mythology, here's how this world works, here's the kind of mechanics behind, you know, how fairies work, how it interacts with Christianity, how, you know, the mechanisms of, you know, the things that Esteban needs to be learning so that when he gets to the big secrets about what is going on with the sea beyond and the mapping project and everything like that, both he and the reader has the tools to be experts in them, to understand them at least a little bit. Yeah.
- [26:40]
Marie Brennan
That includes. Early on in our research, Alyss turned up a book that was just an absolute godsend, because we're like, okay, there's cartography that they're using to deal with the sea beyond. And then Elis turned up a book called Secret Spanish Cosmography and the New World. And we went, what's cosmography?
- [26:57]
Alyss Helms
Cosmography. Yeah, yeah.
- [26:58]
Marie Brennan
And it turns out that this is not a word we made up. People may read the book thinking, oh, you made up your fantasy science kind of thing. No, it's a real thing. It's from history. Cosmography was a kind of an academic discipline in the early modern period. That was this very holistic thing combining cartography and also history and also like, how do you even sail to a place? The hydrography and like, where are the rivers and all of the natural history of it and the, the cultural history of it. All of these things into one. You know, cosmos means like all right or not, not all, but something like that. It was meant to be this holistic, all encompassing thing that you would write your cosmography that described everything. And it stopped being a discipline pretty soon after our period because with the exploration around the world and like, oh, there's also the Americas. So our cosmogr that explained the only continents we thought we existed are incomplete. The fire hose of new information was just so intense that people gave up on the idea that you could write an all encompassing work. Like, you don't see those books now for good reason. But yeah, we saw that and went, okay, we're thinking too limited when we just think cartography and cosmography sounds like a great fantasy word. So cool, we're gonna run with this.
- [28:10]
Alyss Helms
Yeah. And there was an interesting, I think another element to that book that was, that was interesting and it comes out, I think it came out in other places too is the idea of, of knowledge being an arcane secret thing that if you knew a place and kept that knowledge secret, you, you had ownership of it. And it's an interesting kind of flip because I think that, you know, it was, that was true up through Philip II's reign. And then as you kind of get into Philip Third's reign, you get this flip where suddenly like publishing and expressing and saying this is all the stuff we know about this place and being able to demonstrate more knowledge, more acumen, demonstrates your power and control. It's the world fair kind of idea of look at all of our territories that we are exhibiting. You know, this is how we, you know, establish our claim of control over them is because we know them and we can exhibit them and everything like that. So it's this really interesting kind of going from this very secretive, you know, the secret science, this very secretive kind of process of, you know, keeping these things very, very close to just a few people, you know, in very high levels of society, you know, of the bureaucracy that knew to, you know, later you get this split into everybody knows because we need to say that we own this stuff, otherwise, you know, people might question our ownership. So. Yeah, yeah.
- [29:39]
AE Lanier
And that balance of like information intention is so central in the novel as well because of where sort of the Spains are in terms of colonization and so much of what ends up being a driving force is essentially magic as technology that allows for further domination and colonization. So this idea of discovering more things and being able to keep them secret, especially from other European towers, is a really central and interesting part of the novel as well.
- [30:08]
Marie Brennan
Yeah, we didn't have the room really to touch much on what other countries are doing just because, you know, we were trying to make this a shorter book than the Rook and Rose ones and trying to keep our focus on a limited enough thing that we could do justice to it. But yeah, we definitely have a strand in there where there's kind of like defector from Spain who may be getting ready to sell what he knows about how to get to the sea beyond to France. And Esteban is sitting there going, shit. Like, if this information goes to France, then instead of me just having to deal with Spain knowing how to exploit my homeland, there's going to be two countries doing it.
- [30:46]
Dr. Lisa
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- [31:10]
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- [31:52]
AE Lanier
Absolutely. We see sort of a lot of different parts of Spanish culture at this time. Education is one we've talked about. I was wondering if we could talk a little bit about gender as well, because obviously gender is hugely culturally dependent and Esteban has quite a different relationship with gender as a fairy tale then is going to be happening. And again, like the spades during the
- [32:14]
Marie Brennan
Inquisition, though you'd be surprised with that latter. But anyway, Alyssa, if you want to talk about Esteban first.
- [32:20]
Alyss Helms
God, where to start? Well, I mean, so yeah, part of it just comes from we were very much looking for places because we knew we were going to be spending so Much time in masculine halls of power, you know, places to where women would be active and places where we could kind of explore this question. I don't remember, like, why we made the choice for Estevan to be non binary. Because they are. He is non binary insofar as he. I don't think this is a spoiler because it's literally in the prologue with Teresa. He was, you know, the female embodied childhood friend of the. The woman who would become his mother and, you know, then offers to become her son. And she's like, aren't you a woman? And he's like, well, when we became friends when you were a kid, you said that, you know, you couldn't be a friend with a boy, so I was a girl for you, but now you need a boy so I could be a boy for you. And getting to have that in, like, that very first scene, in that very first conversation where we're not even in his perspective. We're in. We're in Teresa's perspective for that scene. And. And, like, kind of getting, like, her kind of very, you know, staunch, non, like, staunch, you know, gender binary ideas of how gender works. And. And hearing that from him really kind of gives you your first taste of, you know, these are very different worlds and are very different assumptions that. That they're coming to him with. But it also kind of let us give a foreshadowing into the way that when we were dealing with fairy, we were actually able to, you know, have a much, you know, broader, wider, you know, playing with gender as. As a role, as a mask, as, you know, not an essential thing. And it's funny because, you know, fairies are. And the way we build them are very essential creatures in a lot of ways. They. They are, you know, they are the name that they are given. Um, but in this way, you know, it's. It's that fluidity of. They are essential to whatever their nature is, but their nature can. Can be anything because they are water, and water is fluid. And. Bryn Marie, if you want to.
- [34:46]
Marie Brennan
Sorry, I. I would only say that, like, you've. You've covered the esteem on part of it well. But we were delighted when we realized because we didn't want it to just be okay. Gender queerness is a fairy thing, right? And not a mobile one. And I happen to know from something I had read years before that, right in the time period that we were looking at, there's someone who. Talking about this instantly gets complicated. English needs pronouns. Someone who was baptized Catalina de Erauso, went by a bunch of different names over the course of their life, including Antonio de Arouso is the one that we just settled on for sort of. Let's not throw six different names for one person at the reader. We're just gonna stick with this one. But a real person. Born to a Basque noble family, they sent their daughter to this convent to be raised as noble daughters often were. She ran away from the convent, started dressing as a guy, went to the New World as a conquistador and had this incredibly violent life that involved killing his own brother, et cetera.
- [35:46]
Alyss Helms
I think he stabbed his uncle for money, too.
- [35:49]
Marie Brennan
Yeah, it's one of those cases where. And we even have an autobiography that was supposedly written by Arouso, but it's, you know, not super detailed. It's a very short book. And it's one of those cases where, depending on which bits you choose to prioritize and such, there's a bunch of different interpretations you can put on this person's life. Like, one of them is that this person was a lesbian who would pass as a man because it was easier for her to get away with, like, flirting with women and so on. Or was she just flirting with the women because she needed money and that was a way to get money. Was like, hey, we're great, right? Give me money. We went with an interpretation that is closer to what, in modern terms we would say is a trans man. Though obviously all of these categories would be meaningless to the actual person because those weren't ideas and terms that existed at the time. But genuinely, like, here's a real person who got found out at one point and ended up being given, like, special dispensation to go on living as a man. So if you think that, oh, like, on the one hand, rigid gender roles in early modern Spain, yes. On the other hand, not always. And there's another character that we didn't manage to work in until the second book, so you won't see them yet. But Elena de Cespedes, who will sometimes get described as an intersex person. Though I've read the actual Inquisition testimony that Cespedes gave, and it looks a lot more like, oh, I've been found out by the Inquisition for dressing as a man and marrying a woman. I know a little bit about medical stuff.
- [37:19]
Alyss Helms
I am now going to make up
- [37:21]
Marie Brennan
what I hope is a plausible sounding story about how, yeah, when I gave birth to my child, the stress of labor caused a penis to pop out and then later it fell off. Like, I. I have to agree with the. The arguments I Read in doing the research that I. I don't think this was an actual intersex person. I think this was someone trying to spin a story to get out of Inquisition custody. But still, gender queerness of the like, dressing as a man probably was a lesbian, wanted to, you know, be able to marry a woman. And there's one more that we didn't manage to work into the story because I only found a passing reference. And one of the names for this person was Esteban, which would have been really confusing, but a fencing teacher who was just wandering around Spain a little bit earlier in the period, sometimes as a man, sometimes as a woman. So I'm like, yeah, real historical, genderqueer people. We were delighted that they lined up, that two of the three of them lined up well enough for us to just slide them into the story and go, yeah, it's not just a fairy thing. This happened in Spain.
- [38:18]
AE Lanier
Well, I'm at gender messiness, I think, especially when we're, like, looking back at the past and especially when we're looking at highly patriarchal societies, right. Where you both have people that exist outside of this, like, very restrictive gender binary. And also you have people that we perhaps would understand as CIS women being like, if I could pass as a different thing, I could get more rights. And this novel does, I think, such a good job of holding all of that messiness and space for all of those things in a way that is really fun. And I think it's interesting, too, right, because y' all are coming at this. Your last trilogy was essentially queer norm. And now moving from a world that is like queer norm into this space that is much more historically driven is just like an interesting contrast and space that y' all are working in, for sure.
- [39:05]
Alyss Helms
Yeah. And we. And we did want to, you know, we're talking about Araso, and just, you know, the. The. The setting in general, we did want to respect the. The, you know, the history as it existed, as we understand it, as we have it in those. In and from those perspectives that the people who lived in those times, those perspectives, rather than imposing kind of, you know, modern contemporary ideas of that. And so I completely forgot where I was going with this. Yeah.
- [39:39]
AE Lanier
Wait, you.
- [39:40]
Marie Brennan
You might have been headed toward the. The conversations we've had around. We actually both feel a need to try to respect real historical people when we put them into the stories. And so while if you look at the way that we present Arouso, it's going to read like a trans man, we avoid ever really coming directly out and Saying, what is it that Arouso, like, what's his identity? What does he want his life to be, his body to be, et cetera? Those things. We leave that more unspoken, partly because, like, we're not in the character's viewpoint and because we don't want to feel like we're making a definitive statement for someone who is a real person, and we don't know what that real person actually thought and felt.
- [40:20]
AE Lanier
So, yeah, absolutely. So we've talked quite a bit about Spain and one of our central POVs, but we have this very fun thing, right, where oftentimes in fantasy, you have multiple POVs who are in radically different places. And you're watching them and you're like, how are they connected? How will they converge? And here we have two main POVs who are very clearly connected in ways that they don't fully understand, but we as the reader certainly do, and we're sort of watching them in their different spaces. So I was wondering if you could talk about the other element of our pair, the hungry girl, who is not in the place where people left her and where they were expecting her to be.
- [41:05]
Marie Brennan
Yeah, Lyssa's right. That I think I was the one who said we need to have this second character, the hungry girl, the girl whose place is Saewon took, partly. I know that I tend to do two protagonist stories a lot like. It crops up very frequently in my novels, from the very first ones, because if you write a book called Doppelganger, of course you're going to have two people in it, but it is something that I do a lot. But in this case, it also just felt absolutely natural, because that is the flip side to the coin. That is a savant that Teresa is like, my husband is going to be so angry that he now has seven daughters and still no son. He's going to kill her. I need a son. Well, what happens to that daughter? And so we knew that we wanted to use her as our view into the sea beyond, rather than the story being trapped in Spain, because anytime you're doing something like this of, oh, it's a story of colonization, we need to see what's happening on the colonized side, not just the colonizer side, even if Esteban's working to undermine it. So we knew that we were going to have her in the sea beyond, which is not where she was supposed to be.
- [42:07]
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- [42:07]
Marie Brennan
And that's part of the fun of,
- [42:08]
Alyss Helms
like, oh, shit, where did she go?
- [42:11]
Marie Brennan
And we do some time weirdness there, partly because we think it Helps give that feeling of time is weird in the Sea Beyond. It does not operate outside of the waters that have been charted. It doesn't operate like it does in the mortal world. But also that though it was fun to take Estaemon through the okay, you're looking at the mortal world and being confused by all of it and not understanding and asking all these questions. Doing the same thing with the Hungry Girl would have felt kind of boring because Estaemon has a goal that he's actively gunning toward from childhood, even if he doesn't realize how far away it is. Whereas the Hungry Girl would have felt more like aimless and adrift and that's less interesting to follow. So her parts of the story are taking place later. And there's a point at which you start getting the clues to see, okay, these things happening on Estevan side now are syncing up with what we originally saw with the Hungry Girl. These timelines are about to converge. But yeah, we start with her. Despite being called a girl, she is a young woman. She's grown up. And yeah, we deliberately set up a thing where she's actually kind of been bounced from island to island in the Sea beyond so that she wouldn't have that parochial. I only know the one place I've been. She's actually traveled through quite a lot of the Sea beyond and has a lot of familiarity with it, which gives us that different way to introduce information to the reader. Like, she actually knows things, she's not having to learn them, but she still has that outsider perspective on them. Of, I'm never quite accepted here because I'm mortal and the Fae never let me forget it.
- [43:40]
AE Lanier
Absolutely. When we meet her, she is on a Harpy island, which is not a good place to be. And it's also like our introduction to the Sea Beyond. Could y' all speak a little bit about Harpy island and why that was sort of the gateway that you chose for us in the Sea Beyond?
- [43:58]
Marie Brennan
I think it came down to the fact, and Alyssa, correct me if I'm wrong about this, so I don't consider this a spoiler because it's also in the COVID copy. Fairly early on in her half of the book, the Hungry Girl meets up with a shit full of conquistadors. And one of the kind of inspirations we were drawing on there was Malinche Malinci. There's a number of different names that get used for her, but there was a woman in Mexico who was like, given to Cortez and operated as, like an interpreter and so on, and has a very ambiguous, contradictory sort of reputation in Mexico because some people are like, sure, she was a traitor who is the reason why the Aztec Empire got conquered, and other people going, she was in this really, like, awful position and had not been treated well by the powers in Mexico, so she had no reason to be their friend. The Hungry Girl is not Valencia. It's not a direct analog of that situation, but we were taking a bit of cue from that, that we wanted the Hungry Girl to meet conquistadors and have a reason to think these are friends, these are allies, these are people that I can help because I want them to help me. And for that to work, we kind of needed her to be in a situation that she wanted to get out of. Right. And being stuck on an island where the magic there is turning your companions into harpies, and you're going to be stuck there alone because you're the only person immune to the harpy magic gives her strong reason to say, oh, some mortals like me have shown up and they can get me off this island.
- [45:28]
Alyss Helms
Yeah. And. And I think in terms of it's. It's a similar kind of approach to, you know, what we were trying to do with Estevan, which is, you know, teach you the world through, like, very quickly, through, you know, very early encounters is, you know, trapping her on that island lets us limit the. The cast of characters that we have to kind of, you know, build relationships towards and kind of be, you know, explicate about. But it also lets us, you know, it gives us a very easy kind of way to describe, you know, how the magic of the islands work. Because it's. It's, you know, while you're on the island, it affects you. And then the further you get away, the. The magic kind of fades. And so, you know, you've got these. You. You immediately can kind of see, oh, these are islands in more than one way. They are not just islands as in land masses. They are pockets of different magical rules. So, you know, the harpy island slowly turns everybody who's on it into a harpy. There's other islands that have other magical rules. And it's again, the. The thing we were talking about before with mythologies of all of this can coexist together, you know, because each one kind of operates in its own little, you know, sphere. And then we also get to show you, you know, because it's a perilous situation, we get to show you that the Hungry Girl is not affected or can choose not to be affected by these magics and that, that's, that's unusual. That's weird. And you know, she quickly comes to understand that that is not true of all humans. Which is, is I think something she originally kind of had assumed because she's never met other humans before. And so there's all of this like necessary early world building that having her in that sort of compartmental situation, you know, shoebox situation, lets us get into very quickly so that the reader can kind of say, okay, I understand how this works and now we can go on to, you know, adventures or conquest or what have you. I will also say, I know that we haven't actually spoken about this as an inspiration. I don't know how much of an inspiration this was for Marie, but it's definitely an inspiration for me. Was the Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. lewis? Yeah, I think I was pretty sure it was, but I'm like that was my thought favorite of the Narnia books as a kid. And it is definitely like I don't think we had talked about a, a Reepy Cheep type character, but I don't think we got Reepicheep type character in. But the inspiration is definitely there throughout. And so again, you know, in that Voyage of the Dawn Treader kind of thing of each place has its kind of own character and personality that we kind of build into it. Yeah.
- [48:14]
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- [48:44]
Marie Brennan
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- [48:49]
Alyss Helms
and like a whole community. It's a club.
- [48:52]
Marie Brennan
Of course, Jason. It's in the name.
- [48:54]
Alyss Helms
Sam's Club. Oh yeah. Come join us. Sam's Club.
- [49:01]
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- [49:26]
AE Lanier
Absolutely. The scope of this book is so fun. It's so interesting, I think. And obviously your last trilogy was very much in one city, and this is the opposite. It is so wonderfully nerdy in the best way there is. Truly, like, so much nerd stuff. We are coming to the end, but before we do, I was wondering if y' all could each share just like a thing, whether that's in the sea beyond or another fact or tidbit, just like some little fun like setting or fact or something that you either were excited to be in there or if it. Right, like if it's, you know, the Lost Reepicheep and it's not in there and you want to talk about it, that's valid as well.
- [50:07]
Alyss Helms
I love the Goblin Armada. And there might be a couple of people who will take exception to the fact that because it is absolutely a reference to Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market, which is several centuries later that it's written. And luckily we made it into the Goblin Armada because it is suitable for the time. And, you know, of course, time works strangely to see beyond. So that's kind of our, like, lampshade on that. But ultimately I'm like, I. I don't care. I love the Goblin Armada. I love the Goblins. I love our entire kind of world building about the Goblins that I think we. We were trying to be very cognizant of certain problematic ways that Goblins are structured in. In. In other literature and not playing into that. And I. I really love the Goblins. They're. They're my. They're my favorite world building thing that we did. And yeah. Yeah.
- [51:06]
Marie Brennan
There's a thing in the second book that I. I won't go into detail about because. Spoilers. But for me, it is the perfect payoff of our entire concept of what it is to be a Goblin. Like, what does that mean in this context? It is just. I. When it finally clicked into places we were trying to solve a particular plot problem, I was like, yes, that is it. And that made every bit of this just, like, even more fun. In. In hindsight, I. I think I'm gonna have to weirdly step outside the book a little bit. I. I wrote, though it's published under the Macarric name, but I wrote a prequel novelette called Non Plus Ultra, which was published in Adventitious magazine. You can read it online for free. And I love doing that one, because it allowed us to take some of the ideas that we had about. Because this story takes place, like, a hundred years after the discovery of how to get to and from the sea beyond. It's a thing that they didn't know how to do. They knew it was there, and every so often, ships would go and. Or sometimes come back, but nobody knew how to make that happen on command. And Nome plus Ultra is the story of how they figured that out. So I like doing related short fiction around the stuff that I've written, and especially when it's something like this, where I go, okay, we worked out this whole story for how that happened, but it would have been an info dump if we put it in the book, if we explained, like, the entire history of that. So getting to write in that novelette a view of the sea beyond where it was exploration, it wasn't yet conquest, that it's somebody sailing around and just, like, finding these things. And he's got a lot of reservations about what he's dealing with, but he's not there as a conqueror. He's literally just trying to get home and getting to toss into that some of those, like, cool bits of, you know, your Voyage of the Dawn Treader feeling. If you're going to these islands and they have their weird magics, I got to put in there something that the Greeks called espidochelone. I forget off the top of my head what the Hebrew word is for it, but it's the. The trope of you land on an island and then somebody goes, that's no island. And all of a sudden it starts sinking beneath your feet because it's a giant sea monster. I'm like, yes, I wanted that in there somewhere. And it would have just felt like a random side note in the Hungry Girls story or something, but it fit perfectly in there.
- [53:21]
Alyss Helms
So I thought you were going to talk about the discussion about whether a particular frog was edible or not.
- [53:31]
Marie Brennan
Oh, okay. Yes, there are a number of. Because it's 1492, and that's also when the Jews were expelled from Spain. Non. Plissultra has a contingent of Sephardim who are being exiled from Spain because they refuse to convert to Christianity. And, yeah, there's an entire by play at one point about whether or not a particular animal counts as kosher and is therefore okay for them to eat. And it's all based on, like, a real rabbinical argument made by a Spanish rabbi who, admittedly, at that point in time, was 4 years old. So he's not actually making that argument yet. But when I came across that, I was like, yes, it's a whole thing about, yeah, whether frogs count as locust, like enough to be kosher to eat. And so yes, there's a whole debate about that and it delighted me.
- [54:17]
AE Lanier
Thank you both for taking the time to talk with me about your book today. I really enjoyed this.
- [54:23]
Marie Brennan
Thank you for having us back.
- [54:24]
Alyss Helms
Thank you very much for having us.
- [54:26]
AE Lanier
Yeah, absolutely. I've been speaking with Ma Carrick about their new novel the Eye of Leviathan, out July 14 from orbit. Thank you for listening and please consider supporting the show by subscribing or leaving a review. I will speak to you soon. And for now, happy reading.
- [54:43]
New Books Network Announcer
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- [55:24]
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