Latest / Mythmakers / Space Opera and Fantasy from Down Under

Transcript

Space Opera and Fantasy from Down Under · Mythmakers

• 0:00
  Hello and welcome to MythMakers. MythMakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy
• 0:13
  creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding. I'm
• 0:19
  the director at the Centre and also an author. And today we are joined from somebody from
• 0:25
  all the other way around on the other side of the world, Michelle Diner, who is sitting
• 0:30
  in Perth in Australia. And I first came across Michelle's books through the audio versions
• 0:37
  of her dark class series, which is a sci-fi series. But as you'll soon hear, Michelle writes
• 0:44
  many different genres. So Michelle, welcome. Perhaps as some people listen to this, I don't know
• 0:50
  your work. Would you like to tell us a little bit about your journey to being a writer?
• 0:55
  Because you don't just do fantasy, do you?
• 0:59
  No, I started out as a historical fiction writer. My first publishing contract was with Simon
• 1:10
  Shuster's gallery books. And I wrote a three-book series for them, set around the quarter
• 1:21
  of Henry VIII. I think at the time Simon and Shuster was owned by CBS, and they had the tutors
• 1:31
  of that television series. And so they were very keen on buying books that were set in the
• 1:40
  Tudor era. And yeah, so, and then I wrote a Regency Set series for them. But in between those historical
• 1:54
  books, I ended up writing quite a lot of fantasy just because it was a really great break for me.
• 2:05
  I found the historicals very self-evidently very research heavy. And I'm quite a perfectionist.
• 2:17
  I was quite stressed by getting every little detail right. And fantasy was a really great
• 2:25
  escape for me, kind of a pressure valve. And yeah, so that's why I started writing more fancy.
• 2:34
  And then I had the idea for the first book in my Class V series, Dark Horse. And I kind of never
• 2:44
  looked back. I haven't written any historicals then. So I've got the series title wrong. So it's
• 2:52
  not Dark Class, it's Class V. Yes, and there are five of them now. Yes, which is wonderful news for
• 2:58
  readers. Just cycling back to what you said about writing historical. I've written historical fiction
• 3:05
  under, well, under various pen names, but particularly as writing for Eve Edwards, I did a Tudor
• 3:11
  series with Penguin. And I remember feeling that same pressure that you talked about. So the way
• 3:19
  I cope with it was focusing down on a year. And sort of saying, right, I'm going to understand
• 3:25
  this year, be it 1580 or whatever it was. And it was even worse when I wrote about the
• 3:31
  second world, the first world war, because there is so much information available. And I was writing
• 3:37
  about the trenches. So I did there is I thought, right, I'm going to find an account from somebody
• 3:46
  in that in the trenches. I'm going to see the day that I'm talking about from their point
• 3:51
  of view. So I found diary and thought, right, I'm just going to know it from that perspective,
• 3:56
  because there was so much, you're right, you just get overwhelmed. So did you do that? So I mean,
• 4:02
  narrowing down thing. Yes, I did. Well, with my tutor set books, the heroine is who's then her
• 4:11
  in boat, who was a real person. So there wasn't a lot written about her. But I did know around about
• 4:20
  when she was when she arrived in London, who she married, what she did while she was there,
• 4:27
  she was an artist in Henry Henry the eighth court. And one of the few women artists that was kind
• 4:37
  of recognized at that level. So that helps. And in my Regency series, I chose a specific historical
• 4:49
  event event. Sorry, I keep hearing myself. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that helps as well to choose,
• 5:00
  as you say, a specific year or a specific event. But in my tutor stuff, I mean, I found myself
• 5:09
  looking up the tide tables for the teams and working out what day was high tide for the day in my
• 5:18
  story. And the color of the mud in the fields and things like that. And I realize I have a problem
• 5:27
  with just getting things super cool. I don't know. I think those sort of details really help.
• 5:33
  I mean, we might talk about this a bit later on, but having a sense of a real time,
• 5:38
  real place really helps carry over into fantasy. And one of the things I learned recently,
• 5:43
  which I really enjoyed was finding out about how Tolkien, because he was during the Second World War
• 5:50
  a firewalls and which meant going up on the roofs of buildings to watch in case fire has broken
• 5:55
  out in any of the historic buildings due to bombing. He tracked the moon cycle, the moon phases.
• 6:04
  And he used what he was seeing for a lot of the rings and the journey nodding the rings
• 6:09
  through his own actual observations. And I think that kind of thing, if people are writing fantasy,
• 6:16
  really helps give a sense of so that you don't have a full moon one day and a
• 6:20
  crescent moon the next. Exactly. Because when people will stop having any faith in your world,
• 6:25
  unless you've got a very fast moon cycle for whatever reason in your, you know, want a different
• 6:30
  planet. I mean, that would be possible. Fantastic. So, it's helping with your plot, I think,
• 6:38
  because in the second book in my chewed a series, I wrote about the boat,
• 6:47
  the boats that kind of rode through the arches of London Bridge and high tide. And those kind of
• 6:56
  things really add to the story and it actually ended up being part of the crescendo at the end.
• 7:05
  And maybe I would not have known that much about it had I not gone into all the tide related
• 7:11
  information. And just so people, people know it's not the current London Bridge, it's the one
• 7:19
  with all the houses on. I wrote a book set, people looking on the bridge. So I also did that,
• 7:24
  and it was really dangerous because they had very narrow apertures. And so the terms is quite
• 7:30
  as strong tide. So it was like shooting a kind of rapids not helped by the fact that it was actually
• 7:36
  cool. So exciting. I must look at that book out, but I don't just read fantasy. I do
• 7:44
  now myself to read historical, so I look forward to reading that too. So Michelle, what do you think
• 7:50
  are your major influences in terms of fantasy on your way to being a writer? Can you think of any
• 7:55
  particular book series or films that have influenced how you come to write your fantasy?
• 8:00
  On my fantasy side, even though I don't write humorous fantasy at all, Terry Pratchett
• 8:14
  was really a big influence because the way he wrote fantasy was very different to what I was
• 8:24
  used to reading before. It was a lot more personal, and it was a lot more, almost, it had a
• 8:32
  contemporary feel to it, but it was set in a fantasy world. And I liked that kind of more immediate
• 8:44
  feel to it. Like I was reading a fast-paced contemporary book, but with all the great fantasy
• 8:55
  world-building that I loved as well, and the magic and obviously his humor was amazing, but
• 9:06
  I also found the same with E&M Banks. I think what both he and Terry Pratchett had that really
• 9:17
  appealed to me was the way that they portrayed women as well. A lot of the fantasy
• 9:25
  greats, I suppose, were men who wrote women in a way that I didn't feel included in when I was
• 9:35
  reading it, and they were the exceptions. And yeah, they had a way of connecting the characters
• 9:47
  and the plot in a way that really appealed to me. And I try and write fantasy that way, not a lot of
• 9:57
  descriptive world-building. I try and bring the world-building in through the observations of the
• 10:06
  of the characters themselves. So that's E&M Banks. Is that things like the was factory and those kind
• 10:15
  of things? That was his contemporary stuff, so that's what he wrote as E&M Banks. Right science
• 10:20
  fiction is he used the name E&M Banks. So he wrote a number of science fiction books, I don't know,
• 10:30
  about 15 to 20. You have one that you acquired a lot of them? Yes. Well, all of them are great,
• 10:40
  but my favourite is the use of weapons. Okay, right, I'm adding that to my reading list,
• 10:46
  immediately. So let's think about your overview of your various series. So I've noticed,
• 10:55
  I've only started reading you since the beginning of the year, so I've got a lot of reading to catch
• 10:59
  up on. But so we start with the class five series. I've seen it described as a space opera, so
• 11:08
  people immediately think Star Wars, don't they? But it's not Star Wars in that one of the cultures
• 11:14
  in it is our humanity, as opposed to being set in a galaxy far, far away with no contact to
• 11:22
  humanity. So would you like to sort of just give a little, what's the word, elevated pitch, I
• 11:28
  suppose they call it about that series? What's going on in that? Yeah, that series is really an
• 11:35
  alien abduction series, but it's not someone who gets abducted and then gets returned
• 11:46
  to earth. They were abducted and there's no way back. And they find them, the first book was
• 11:55
  written where I conceived of this character, Rose, who was abducted, but she wasn't the only
• 12:04
  prisoner. She eventually just realises that the ship itself that she's been captured by is also
• 12:14
  prisoners because he's an artificial intelligence. And the two of them form a collaboration to
• 12:22
  free themselves. And once they accomplish that, they discover, particularly Rose discovers,
• 12:32
  that she's in the middle of a whole lot of other cultures that have a deep-seated fear of
• 12:41
  artificial intelligence. And she is now freed this artificial intelligence. And he is now the most
• 12:49
  powerful being in the well, you know, the galaxy that she's found herself in. And how she
• 12:57
  negotiates that, and it was a lot of fun to write. Well, we'll be coming back to that series in a
• 13:03
  minute, but there's also, of course, the wave rider series that you... Yes, the burden string.
• 13:12
  Yes. Yeah. So what's going on in that series? That is more... As far as I suppose,
• 13:22
  that is... This is for your writers. This was my world-building solution because I wrote the
• 13:32
  Class V series, and obviously I had a whole world that I created with technology and culture
• 13:40
  and everything that comes with that. And then I wrote another series called The Sky Raid
• 13:45
  is series, which is actually closer to Star Wars than anything else. And I had culture and
• 13:54
  technology for that. And then I had some other stories to tell. And I thought about it and I went,
• 14:03
  this has got to be the last time I create an entirely new technology. There is only so much
• 14:11
  technology I can come up with that's completely different to all the other ones that I've done.
• 14:18
  And so I created this series called The Verden String where I could easily fit the stories that I
• 14:28
  had into an existing world. They don't... They aren't consecutive. People can read them in any order.
• 14:37
  Although they actually is an arc, a story arc, but you don't have to start at the beginning.
• 14:45
  You can come in at any point, but I don't have to reinvent the wheel for every single one of them.
• 14:54
  So that was my solution.
• 14:58
  If people wish to trace all these different series, we will be putting a link to Michelle's
• 15:03
  website in the show notes. So please look at that and then you can explore and pick your book
• 15:08
  where you start. So going back to the class five series, the first thing I wanted to ask you about
• 15:18
  is actually the humour because you mentioned that you were fond of Terry Pratchett and you don't
• 15:25
  write, they're not comedies in the same way as the Terry Pratchett are, but what you do have is a
• 15:31
  very strong sense of humour and for me where that resides in the class five series is around music.
• 15:38
  So just to explain to people who haven't read the series, what we've got here is
• 15:43
  a human woman who has been abducted, this is Rose. She comes to
• 15:51
  awareness or you know, she sort of wakes up in this alien spaceship and eventually is, I think
• 15:59
  it's not too much for a spoiler, is rescued by a nicer bunch of a different alien culture.
• 16:06
  But she finds that she's regarded as incredibly musically gifted because that particular species
• 16:14
  haven't got the vocal abilities to sing nicely. So she comes along, things happy birthday
• 16:21
  to somebody and they're absolutely astonished and amazed. And this joke is the jokes that
• 16:27
  keeps on giving because as you get more other characters coming along, some who are more musically
• 16:32
  talented than others, with different musical choices. And they react differently to being asked to
• 16:38
  sing, you know, some feel like they're the performing monkey and some feel, yeah, of course,
• 16:43
  and one's a music teacher, so yeah, she's in her comforts thing. I just enjoyed all that so much.
• 16:49
  So I suppose I have a question for you, which is, are you musical?
• 16:54
  I played the piano as a child, but I had one of those rarely terrible piano teachers that would
• 17:03
  smack, you know, hit your fingers if you weren't fast enough on the scales. And so I took my kids
• 17:10
  to music lessons and the way they were taught was so much better than the way I was taught. I started
• 17:18
  learning all over again, sitting at their lessons. My daughter and my son both have done musical
• 17:28
  the way to their final year. And my daughter is actually in a band and her single is played
• 17:36
  on the radio. And so yes, we are a musical family and I love music. And listening to my daughter,
• 17:46
  in particular, my daughter practiced a piano while I was writing the Class V series,
• 17:54
  influenced some of my musical choices in the book.
• 17:58
  There's some, yeah, there's some wonderful moments, like there's a moment where someone sings
• 18:03
  fly me to the moon, which is great. And there's also a Bohemian rhapsody, which starts off as a
• 18:08
  bit of a nose-nubbing moment where she's sort of thinking, well, I'm going to go for some
• 18:13
  pianist song. Which is great. But it is also through humour, what you're doing, of course,
• 18:21
  is thinking about the presence, the ubiquitous presence of music in our lives, which we take
• 18:25
  for granted. And imagining a place where that is something very hard to access is, for them,
• 18:32
  it's a very limited resource. So if you were abducted by the gree, who are the bad guys in this
• 18:40
  context? And we're only allowed up to an hour's music, which is what we've discovered is allowed
• 18:46
  to the last of your most recent books. She's got an hour's music recorded that she's allowed to
• 18:52
  listen to. What would be in your hour? Obviously, your daughter's tingle would be amongst that.
• 18:59
  Yes, definitely. That's pretty funny.
• 19:05
  What other tracks would you want to take to an alien culture?
• 19:09
  Well, I tend to over listen to things that I love. And then I end up not liking them as much.
• 19:17
  But I have never tired of walking on sunshine by Katrina and the waves. So that's definitely
• 19:25
  something that I would take along. Nina Simone's, my baby, just cares for me, which is in one of the books.
• 19:35
  And I think I would have to take some YouTube and some classical music.
• 19:47
  It's quite difficult. It's quite hard when you've only got an hour's music.
• 19:51
  That's right. I mean, you used to tend to last a bit longer. So you think, which one?
• 19:56
  You can't do like the Bach, Matthew, Passion or something because that's your hour gone.
• 20:01
  Maybe the night cracker by Shaikovsky.
• 20:06
  I think that it takes me back. Your book actually took me back to something that happened
• 20:11
  when I was at school, which is when I was in the high school equivalent, where occasionally,
• 20:19
  a teacher would be invited to give us sort of, this is something I love assembly.
• 20:26
  And my English teacher, who was my favorite teacher, of course,
• 20:31
  she said, she stood up and said, I'm going to play you a piece of music,
• 20:35
  which is my favorite piece of music. And it's the thing which sends tingles down my spine.
• 20:42
  And she played the Allegri Missouri, which is an incredible piece of choral music, famously written
• 20:50
  down. It was sort of hidden in the Vatican as their special piece of music. Moves up,
• 20:54
  listened to it once and came and wrote it down. And so got the secret out there.
• 20:59
  And it's not the kind of music I'd listened to before. And that moment of being transported from a
• 21:08
  Essex 9 o'clock in the morning, school assembly to this world of music, I think is a bit like
• 21:16
  how it might feel for an alien species hearing someone sing. So that's what I'm thinking of when I
• 21:24
  read your books. I think so. The idea of singing is very human. It's like story and singing
• 21:35
  is almost quintessentially human and trying to explain, as you say, the ubiquity of that
• 21:44
  to erase that doesn't hear it and highly prizes it is a running joke. And also a nod to
• 21:57
  human creativity, I think. Yeah, definitely. But let's talk about the subject of Art of Intelligence,
• 22:06
  which you have also explored in sort of a second main theme that is apparent in all the books.
• 22:13
  I don't want to give too much away because it is quite nice to find out, as you read,
• 22:20
  it's one of these plot developments, which is fun to find out. But there is a question of how far
• 22:26
  should AI be independent? And I know that for example, there are many scientists in our world have
• 22:36
  warned that it could get us sort of, you know, to the point of no return. Is it something that your
• 22:43
  personally worried about? I mean, Stephen Hawking said it was one of the big challenges of our
• 22:48
  century. Yeah, I think what concerns me is who writes the code that starts it off. Because
• 23:01
  from what I can gather on a lot of algorithms and facial recognition and things like that,
• 23:11
  and whatever code runs apps, things can go wrong if there isn't a wide array of people
• 23:28
  involved in the project. So you need voices from all different kinds of sectors of society
• 23:42
  involved in it, in my opinion. And I think that might be where the trouble will start.
• 23:50
  Whether or not it's going to become a huge problem, I guess time will tell. But I do think
• 24:03
  who we choose to write the kind of the or lay the groundwork will affect the outcome, obviously.
• 24:15
  Yeah, I think it's also there's a huge problem about data sets. I got very interested in this at
• 24:20
  one point. And I was reading as an excellent book by called the Creativity Code by Marcus DeSotoi,
• 24:26
  if you want to read about this in a technical sense. And so you've got an algorithm. But what happens
• 24:33
  now is that these algorithms teach themselves. And what they train themselves on are sets of data.
• 24:40
  So take, for example, facial recognition. If your data set, which is massive, is bias towards
• 24:51
  those who use an upload photograph. So let's say a Western world where it's predominantly white,
• 24:58
  you end up with a skewing towards male white as being the norm. That's because the data is not
• 25:07
  that someone's gone in and sort of said go and look for this. It's the data is this raw stuff,
• 25:12
  which the algorithm is using to teach itself. So people get this sort of strange bias coming in.
• 25:21
  And once the bias is there, it gets magnified. And so it has real world terrible outcomes. So for
• 25:28
  example, there is a move to make justice, you know, have a sort of automatic impartial algorithm
• 25:38
  deciding minor cases. But if your data is skewed to say that this percentage of young black males
• 25:45
  are likely to be guilty because that's what the data set tells you, it will skew the program.
• 25:51
  So you do, as you're saying, without the hand on the tiller of other voices saying,
• 25:56
  hang on a minute, my community is being represented or abused here. You can end up with
• 26:02
  terrible, terrible outcomes. I'm unjust unfair.
• 26:09
  And of course the same is true for its bias male against female and different age groups.
• 26:15
  I mean, there's all sorts of things that can go wrong in this. But there is also the question
• 26:22
  of the right of artificial intelligence itself if it gets to the point where it's aware and what
• 26:29
  that how you would imagine how you measure self-awareness. I mean, Star Trek has done this a lot
• 26:36
  over there with characters like data, but you're also looking at that issue.
• 26:41
  Do you think that's what for you would be self-awareness? What's your twist?
• 26:52
  When I... Yeah, it's extremely tricky. And when I wrote the Class Five series,
• 26:59
  I made the AI characters quite young, just exploring their world, but fully
• 27:12
  sentient already. And then towards the end of the series, I introduced some more evolving
• 27:22
  drawings who are slowly becoming sentient. And that was an interesting line that I was playing
• 27:35
  with and I actually don't know the answer other than to say it's a slow process of many small steps
• 27:47
  that they finally almost become their own personalities. And at that point, I think you can say
• 27:58
  they're self-aware, they understand what's going on and they're making their own choices.
• 28:07
  But it is incredibly difficult. I think you're very clear in the books that it's how you treat
• 28:14
  the AI, you get the answer back. So if you model mercy and humanity in the best sense,
• 28:26
  you get that back. Whereas if you fearful and try and trap it and try and shut it down,
• 28:32
  then you get aggression back, which is, you know, totally understandable, absolutely.
• 28:38
  I noticed that in the second book in the series, Dark Deeds, that you name the hero is called How?
• 28:47
  Was that a nod towards 2001, the space odyssey?
• 28:51
  No, no, that's the most difficult one. It's just so right.
• 28:57
  Mr. Mr. I will not open the door, answer, yeah.
• 29:02
  No, that was not intentionally done.
• 29:07
  Okay, anyway, I smiled when I saw that. So Michelle, just thinking more broadly now at all of your
• 29:13
  writing and thinking about people listening to this who are aspiring to be writers too,
• 29:19
  would you say that your process of writing is more character-led or plot-led or do you start with
• 29:25
  some sort of overarching idea? What's the very early stages of your creative process?
• 29:32
  It's usually personality-led, you know, character-led, but how I usually find most of my book
• 29:42
  starting with like a scenario, a person dealing with something specific. And so that's
• 29:52
  got a plot element in it already as the starting point. For example, Rose discovering
• 30:02
  that while she's a prisoner, she has an ally who's actually also a prisoner but has the ability
• 30:12
  to help her if she can help him. And it's that give and take that started the whole series for me,
• 30:22
  just just the idea of it. Oh, you you're alone, you're helpless, but actually you've got the
• 30:30
  brain and the most dangerous entity at your back. And that really fun juxtapodite ducks I
• 30:44
  Oh, sorry, I keep hearing myself.
• 30:46
  Jax, I can't say that, wouldn't it?
• 30:48
  Yeah.
• 30:50
  Jax, that position.
• 30:52
  Yeah.
• 30:54
  Of powerlessness and powerfulness together, which I enjoyed.
• 31:01
  And that's quite often what happens in my rising wave series
• 31:07
  as well.
• 31:08
  I had that same feeling, yeah.
• 31:12
  So do you have any tips on world building?
• 31:14
  You've said you've had to make three lots of worlds with technology.
• 31:18
  That's just the sci-fi.
• 31:21
  Not the fantasy.
• 31:24
  What I think is the best is whatever world you've decided to create,
• 31:31
  as you go about your normal day, think about yourself
• 31:36
  doing that same thing in the world that you've created.
• 31:40
  And that makes a much more solid world in your own mind.
• 31:46
  And then it's easier to write and get a sense of that place.
• 31:55
  Go to the shops and think, how would people
• 31:58
  buy food or clothes in this world that I've now created?
• 32:05
  Also, think about power.
• 32:08
  I think that's one of the most important things.
• 32:11
  Who has power?
• 32:14
  What do they do with that power?
• 32:17
  Who doesn't have power?
• 32:19
  What do they do to compensate for not having it?
• 32:24
  And a lot of things can lead from there just plot-wise.
• 32:32
  And just to make the world very believable.
• 32:40
  That's a really good tip.
• 32:41
  Thank you.
• 32:42
  Or two good tips there.
• 32:43
  Thank you.
• 32:45
  Also, we haven't touched on it that much,
• 32:48
  but there is a romance element in your stories.
• 32:54
  Just to say, when you say alien abduction,
• 32:57
  just to point out these aren't the alien abduction ones
• 33:02
  that you might find the sort of rippling muscle ones.
• 33:08
  It's not that kind of book.
• 33:13
  It's that's the scenario, not the, yeah.
• 33:15
  Anyway, so in terms of how you handle the romance.
• 33:18
  I see planet barbarians or anything like that.
• 33:21
  Yeah, yeah.
• 33:22
  Which are great reads if that's what you feel like,
• 33:26
  but we're doing something else in these particular series.
• 33:30
  So when you've got a romance and people know
• 33:33
  when they're reading this, OK, someone that she meets
• 33:36
  is going to be the romance.
• 33:39
  How do you think about this slow burn versus I've only
• 33:43
  got so many pages to get this and perhaps a limited time span
• 33:47
  because of your plot is compressing things?
• 33:51
  How do you handle that?
• 33:52
  Is it something that you think about in advance
• 33:55
  or is it something that you do in a second edit?
• 33:58
  How do you pace it?
• 34:01
  It isn't something I think about in advance,
• 34:05
  but it does worry me the whole way through.
• 34:09
  I, in some of my books, it happens
• 34:16
  because of the plot, the relationship starts sooner.
• 34:22
  And in some, it's only by the middle of the book
• 34:26
  that the romance kind of starts happening.
• 34:30
  And I'm just led by logic and timeframes
• 34:37
  and what actually makes sense.
• 34:40
  So I don't try and force anything.
• 34:46
  And I'm just quite careful with how I deal with it.
• 34:54
  So in some cases, people are automatically attracted
• 34:59
  to each other.
• 35:01
  And in others, the love interest will start out
• 35:06
  being quite weary of the heroine, for example.
• 35:12
  And slowly that turns into something more.
• 35:15
  And yeah, I particularly enjoyed Fiona and Hal
• 35:23
  because what I like in that particular one
• 35:26
  is how the people around Hal really distrusted her.
• 35:34
  And that happens again in that element of you,
• 35:39
  not everybody just accepts this person as being
• 35:41
  the thing of what's their agenda.
• 35:44
  And I like that because it puts a bit of grit in the oyster
• 35:47
  to make it feel as though she's not sort of hearts and flowers.
• 35:51
  It's actually pushing against a cultural norms,
• 35:55
  which say this shouldn't work.
• 35:58
  Yeah, particularly because there's a, in the book
• 36:02
  before, Rosa's brought along all of this trouble
• 36:06
  with this early other own making.
• 36:09
  So in the subsequent books, the other heroines
• 36:13
  have to wear that conflict.
• 36:17
  So yeah, as with the romance, I try and I'm
• 36:27
  trying to be mindful of the circumstance
• 36:31
  each heroine is in.
• 36:34
  And what would be logical for people
• 36:38
  to assume about them?
• 36:44
  So would you say that you mentioned
• 36:49
  that you turned to writing fantasy after having
• 36:52
  the sort of rigors of historical research?
• 36:54
  Would you say that the actual writing process
• 36:56
  though feels different when you're writing historical or fantasy
• 37:01
  or sci-fi?
• 37:03
  Or is it just you've gone through that door today?
• 37:05
  That's what's happening.
• 37:09
  I think they're quite similar world building techniques
• 37:13
  in each of them.
• 37:15
  I almost consider historical fiction speculist
• 37:18
  a fiction because we are imagining
• 37:22
  to a large degree how things were, particularly
• 37:26
  if you go back to the Tudor era or something.
• 37:30
  So as far as that goes, I think you
• 37:33
  have to bring the same skills, world building skills
• 37:39
  to historicals.
• 37:41
  And a lot of fantasy is generally kind of medieval
• 37:47
  in its background setting.
• 37:50
  So yeah, I think they're very similar.
• 37:56
  Yeah, I agree.
• 37:57
  And I think that so for example, if you put in your fantasy world,
• 38:00
  I did a fantasy world where someone was looked after birds
• 38:06
  of prey.
• 38:08
  That was his job, sort of scamming the vermin down.
• 38:12
  And so you can go to a bird of prey center
• 38:17
  and find out how the medieval people did this
• 38:20
  when it was part of society.
• 38:21
  And again, it's historical research
• 38:23
  that it feeds into a fantasy world.
• 38:24
  It's great fun at that kind of research.
• 38:27
  Yes.
• 38:28
  So to end our podcast, we always say
• 38:33
  wherein all the fantasy world is the best place for something.
• 38:36
  And I was saying to you before we started this,
• 38:40
  that I'd already done where's the best place to be a singer.
• 38:43
  And I'd pick your world.
• 38:44
  Because I thought, you know, anybody
• 38:46
  of a modicum of talent would come out really well in your world.
• 38:50
  So I can't even a modicum.
• 38:53
  Yeah, just being happy birthday, you're right, you're in there.
• 38:57
  So I thought that because the other big theme
• 39:00
  is artificial intelligence, my question for you
• 39:04
  is where in all the fantasy worlds that you've read
• 39:07
  or watched on the big screen,
• 39:10
  would you think it'd be a good place to be a sentient droid?
• 39:14
  So I think the Star Wars universe, there is a really good place
• 39:21
  for a sentient droid there.
• 39:24
  I don't think it's a good place.
• 39:26
  Yeah, I think Blade Runner universe wouldn't be good.
• 39:31
  No, no.
• 39:32
  Exactly the opposite of Star Wars.
• 39:35
  Yeah, it was originally based on the novella
• 39:41
  duanjoy's dream of electric sheep.
• 39:44
  That one. That's right.
• 39:45
  Which, I think, is much, much funnier.
• 39:48
  I don't know if people have ever read the novel
• 39:50
  and compared it to the film.
• 39:51
  It's like two completely different takes.
• 39:54
  And it's less bad, I think, in the funny version.
• 39:58
  That's still not great.
• 39:59
  Yeah, no, I agree.
• 40:00
  I think Star Wars wins that one.
• 40:03
  Those just to be a bit different,
• 40:05
  I might actually pick Star Trek
• 40:08
  because you get to actually be a member of the crew,
• 40:12
  don't you, if you're... That's true.
• 40:14
  Thank you.
• 40:15
  So...
• 40:16
  Oh, and a helper.
• 40:18
  Yeah, yeah.
• 40:19
  So I think I'll pick Star Trek, you pick Star Wars
• 40:24
  and hopefully will please both fandoms by our choices, though.
• 40:30
  So Michelle, thank you so much for being a guest on MythMakers.
• 40:34
  And I hope that this means that many more people
• 40:37
  will look out for your books
• 40:39
  and enjoy the many series that you've written.
• 40:42
  So thank you very much.
• 40:45
  Well, thanks very much for having me.
• 40:48
  Goodbye.
• 40:49
  Goodbye.
• 41:20
  It's worldwide.