Welcome to this Track of Words Author Interview, my ongoing series of quick interviews with authors talking about their new releases. These are short and sweet interviews, with the idea being that each author will answer (more or less) the same questions – by the end of each interview I hope you will have a good idea of what the new book (or audio drama) is about, what inspired it and why you might want to read or listen to it.
This time I’m talking to the delightful Nate Crowley about his new book Notes From Small Planets, a travel guide to some of the most entertaining, sharply-observed science fiction and fantasy worlds imaginable. It’s published today by Harper Voyager, and if you have any interest in SFF – especially if you’re in need of a good laugh – then I really can’t recommend this enough!
Without further ado let’s get straight to the questions…
Track of Words: How would you describe your new book Notes From Small Planets?
Nate Crowley: So it’s a travel guide, in the Lonely Planet / Rough Guide format, which you might think was the worst possible thing I could have written for 2020. The catch is, however, none of the destinations it concerns are real. They’re fantasy worlds I’ve invented, each of which is an affectionate, but often fairly cutting take on one of the classic subgenres of SFF.
ToW: What can you tell us about the (fictional) author of the book, and the unusual rivalry he seems to have with his editor?
NC: Floyd Watt, who writes NFSP, is a disgraced diplomat turned reality TV contestant, who gets an astonishing chance to revive his faded celebrity by touring these astonishing worlds (which apparently just became accessible one day!), and writing about them. Unfortunately, Floyd is potentially the worst man for the job – imagine someone with a mix of Michael Portillo, Jeremy Clarkson and Alan Partridge energies, but who also thinks of themself as being an enlightened, progressive fellow. He consistently makes terrible decisions, and his editor – a young woman called Eliza Salt – is engaged in a constant battle to try and work around them. The conceit of NFSP is that it never actually saw print due to Floyd and Eliza’s falling out, and so the printed manuscript is a second draft, complete with hundreds of footnotes worth of arguing between them.
ToW: Why a travel guide to SFF worlds? Of all the books you might have written, why this one?
NC: Well, since I started writing in 2018, I had no idea of the circumstances that would surround its launch, but the escapism angle has proved…timely. I suppose more than that, this is a book that satirises both the way people approach travel, and the way they approach reading fantasy. Travel is often used as a metaphor for reading, and if you think about it, there are a lot of parallels: we go to places that provide things lacking in our everyday life. And often we’re so in love with them, that we’re maybe a little too eager to overlook the less comfortable aspects – whether that’s the children picking through rubbish heaps behind a five star hotel, or the unquestioned introduction of a species as an ‘evil warrior race’.
ToW: You clearly had a lot of fun talking both lovingly and scathingly about SFF tropes, but how did you choose which ones to include?
NC: Honestly? By including all of them, and then having my editor beg me to redraft the book at half the length! Generally, though, I’ve grouped subgenres by common elements – so there’s Mittelvelde, which is the high fantasy world, Wasteland, which is the world which has suffered every conceivable type of apocalypse, Grondorra! (exclamation mandatory), which is a pulpy, sword & sorcery world full of barbarians, dinosaurs and ray guns. Spume is an interesting one – that’s the pirate world, and it really got me thinking about how disproportionately large the shadow cast by pirates on modern culture is. And how weirdly specific our idea of pirates is, too – peg legs, silly accents, rum and all the rest. As Floyd himself says, “I’m not sure ‘theft, but wet’ is even the basis for a genre”.
My favourite is the split world of Whimsicalia and Mundania, which was originally a world a bit like the one featured in Harry Potter, but which went through a brutal conflict when ordinary people discovered there were wizards secretly lording over them, and now exists in a sort of grim, cold war situation with machine gun checkpoints, and sheltered accomodation full of former child soldiers. It gets dark!
Fans of Nate’s writing will know he has a history of wild imagination and going to dark places!
ToW: Did you need to do much research while writing this, or was the whole thing straight out of your imagination?
NC: All out of my imagination – I figured if I needed to check a detail in order to roast it, then it probably wasn’t archetypical enough to have earned a roasting in the first place. With that said though, I did a vast amount of worldbuilding to make sure that each of the worlds was internally consistent – they needed to be believably functional, rather than just jokes strung together. As such, I mapped every world in great detail (versions of these maps appear in the book!), and wrote something like 100,000 words of additional background that never made it to the final draft. You have no idea how long I spent trying to devise a functional economic model comprising only pirates.
ToW: How did you find reaching a balance between parodying, celebrating and critiquing the SFF stories and subgenres that you’re riffing off here? Did that come naturally, or did you have to work to find that balance?
NC: It was surprisingly natural. From the outset, I was dead certain that I wanted Notes to revel in its subject matter, as well as beasting it. And I think that mirrors how I try to read SFF. To use a much-debated example, take HP Lovecraft. I think a lot of time is wasted excusing the man’s racism in order to justify enjoyment of his eye for horror, when it’s better just to accept that he was a very racist man who also had a great imagination. JK Rowling’s personal politics are really depressing to me (NFSP was written before her current obsession with trans people, and she still annoyed me enough to earn a chapter), but she knows how to write a page-turner. Travel, too – if you’re going to visit a former British colony as someone from the UK, you should at least open your eyes to the social damage your own heritage has inflicted on the place, but it’s not inhuman to enjoy the food at the same time.
ToW: I was surprised at how rarely crabs, invertebrates or other deep-sea marine creatures featured in the Worlds, but even so it seems like you had fun inventing wildlife names – do you have a favourite creature that you’ve included in the book?
NC: Well, there was a reference to Tobias H Beastcounter, the Spumish biologist who set out to categorise the full biosphere of the pirate world, but died at the age of 93, having got halfway through the section on crabs. But I did rein myself in a little on that front. Still, I *really* enjoyed the wildlife sections. I’ve always wanted to write a bestiary, in fact, and NFSP let me flex those muscles a bit. As for a favourite, I quite liked the Gurbo (beastus shittus), which was my attempt at the most pathetic chimera I could come up with, taking the form of “a cheetah’s face, slapped haphazardly onto the back end of a turkey with tortoise legs”.
ToW: If you could pick just one of the Worlds from Notes… to visit, which one would it be and why?
NC: Potentially Wasteland, actually. Even though it’s a global ruin, where the region known as the Badlands is actually the nicest bit, I think it’s not a bad place. Because the end of the world has already happened, multiple times in fact, nobody’s remotely anxious about the future, and is just enjoying themselves. There are a legion of skull-faced robots who don’t understand how time travel works (and so keep accidentally sending burly cyborgs into the past to act as surrogate father figures for the leader of the human resistance), and they’re a riot. Due to EMP damage, they are all convinced they’re cockneys, and that anyone who speaks in a cockney accent must therefore be a robot, so you could very easily infiltrate their citadel and enjoy endless jaunty knees-ups around the robot pub piano, so long as you speak like you’re in Eastenders. Did I write that bit while writing Severed? I couldn’t possibly comment.
ToW: What do you hope fantasy and science fiction fans will get out of this by the time they’ve finished it?
NC: As I suppose I touched on earlier, I’d like to at least promote a sort of mentality where we can be openly critical of the things we love, while still loving them. I see a lot of people adopting an overly defensive sort of fandom, where they take any criticism of a property as a demand for its abolition, and I also see a lot of people trying unsuccessfully to prove that properties have absolutely no merit in themselves, just because the author had some garbage views. I’d love to see genre fiction move gracefully away from some of its bleak historical baggage, and this is my (hopefully not Floydian) attempt to help.
ToW: Is this a one-off, or are there yet more SFF tropes ready and waiting for you to have fun with in a future book?
NC: Well, as I say, there’s a LOT of cut material! Speaking realistically, I’m contracted to produce a second book for Harper Voyager, which I’m about to begin discussing with them. That may be another Floyd adventure, and may even be in this format – or it may even be something entirely different. I’d be wary of suggesting what, at this stage, that would be. However, there was Floyd’s former career as a diplomat to consider, and I am very, very into inventing alien cultures.
ToW: Can you tell us about something that was so mad, strange or far out in an early draft that your editors had you reel it in?
NC: There was an entire chapter on magical realism, a.k.a fantasy for writers who consider themselves too highbrow to write fantasy. That chapter was brutal, because the idea of separating genre fiction from ‘literature’ has been a lifelong wasp in my bonnet. It didn’t really fit with the tone of the rest of the book, but I intend to find a use for the copy one day. Oh, and in fact, the first draft on Notes was in fact a first person narrative novel, which I got quite a way into before we changed format, and which had a wild SF metaplot involving elves. Some of that survives in the final version, for those keeping an eye on the details…
ToW: What’s next for Nate Crowley? Do you have any other work coming out soon that you can tell us about?
NC: Ha! A lot! But not too much I can discuss. There will be the followup to NFSP, in whatever format that takes. I’ve also got a non-fiction title on the animal world in the works, but Covid put that back from 2020 to 2021. I’ve also got two novels completed for Black Library, which I’m desperate to talk about, as well as a handful of short stories in the works…they should all be announced before Christmas, hopefully. Speak then!
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Thanks so much to Nate for taking the time to answer these questions and give us all the lowdown on Notes From Small Planets! If you haven’t already, make sure you check out my review here – and then do yourself a favour and pick up a copy of this brilliant book.
See also: this interesting blog post from The Artworks about designing the cover for this book.
Click here if you fancy taking a look at some other Author Interviews. If you have any questions, comments or other thoughts please do let me know in the comments below, or find me on Twitter.
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This book sounds like such a blast. Great interview, really enjoyed it!