Ananda Lima & L. M. Sagas on the Devil and A.I.

Tor Publishing Group, in partnership with Literary Hub, presents Voyage Into Genre! Every other Wednesday, join host Drew Broussard for conversations with Tor authors discussing their new books, the future, and the future of genre. Oh, and maybe there’ll be some surprises along the way…

Hail and well-met, travelers! The voyage continues with a brand-new season—and a refreshed format, so make some room on the ship for multiple guests at once. Yes, that’s right, we’re making good on all our talk of community (especially after that delightful multi-author tour earlier this year) and putting authors in conversation with each other as well as with your faithful host.

To kick things off, we’ve got two Tor Books authors hopping aboard: Ananda Lima (Craft: Stories I Wrote For the Devil) and L. M. Sagas (Cascade Failure + Gravity Lost). The conversation was a giddy one, full of passionate considerations about the importance of genre fiction to speak truth to power but also goofs about the difference between the Devil and a ships-captain AI and why writing for yourself is always, always, always the way to go.

See you in the skies,
Drew

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Read the full episode transcript here.

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FROM THE EPISODE:

L.M. Sagas: So I actually originally was playing around with just doing it in one point of view and that’s the first one that you meet, the character Jal. Just this good golden retriever kind of character—the “looks like a cinnamon roll, acts like a cinnamon roll, but could actually kill you” kind of trope.

I thought about sort of playing the whole thing out with him, but as I was going through it was like, you can add a lot of dimension by having those extra points of view. So, you know, you have this character Jal who thinks of himself a certain way, but then you throw in his old battle buddy they’ve got this history that comes in and you get to see him a totally different way.And so you get multiple perspectives on the different characters by being in their heads and then being outside of their heads and how other characters are encountering them. And it also works that way for the plot. And I think maybe some of those jukes that you were talking about, maybe that’s facilitated by the fact that there are those multiple points of view.

So you have a character who’s thinking about doing one thing and this is their motivation and this is how they see things happening. And then you’re over in someone else’s head and they’re seeing something totally different, even if they’re describing the same event and playing around with what you see and, and what you don’t, I think was something that I had a lot of fun with because it did let me pull a few of those bait and switch kind of moves.

Drew Broussard: Yeah. I mean it’s really, it’s really cool how it does work like that, where it’s not ever a sort of, I’ve sold you this story and now it turns out it’s something else. It really is the, the complicated humanity of all of these characters and the fact that, yeah, like of course we don’t know what’s going on in somebody else’s head, the best thing we can do is try to talk, try to read their stories, maybe.

And this, I mean, this obviously has me thinking about Craft, Ananda, because the points of view are so slippery in this book, the sort of like layering of meta narrative. But I’m also conscious that it is a story collection. And so to some extent you expect that from a story collection, but this even does it in new and surprising ways. And I I guess maybe the question for you is what came first some of these stories or the character of the writer who has this, liaison with the devil?

Ananda Lima: Yes, I love this. I love hearing from L.M., this idea that you have, like the cozy sci-fi base, and then you can do all this play that is from the writing, right? Like if you watch a show, you can’t do these things as well. So you have what you got from that experience growing up, watching those shows, but then you can complicate it so much on the page.

I love that. So with Craft, I had so much fun with the meta layer, but it came later. I didn’t have all the stories, I had enough, maybe four or something, where I saw that there was something common between them. There was this craft between them, either the witchcraft or the writing craft that was unifying them.

When I saw that they were unified, there was something together and there was so much meta in some of the stories already. I decided that getting out of the story would be even more fun for me. So I had a few stories first before the writer came in, but not all the stories. So they kind of like fed off each other.

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Tor Presents: Voyage into Genre is a co-production with Lit Hub Radio. Hosted by Drew Broussard. Studio engineering + production by Stardust House Creative. Music by Dani Lencioni of Evelyn.