I am super excited to share my interview with Matthew Samuels, author of Parasites, the Science Fiction book I gushed about yesterday. I really enjoyed this book and I hope that this interview will give you a glimpse into the thought that went into it. Click on my reading experience graphic to check out my thoughts later.
I have had the pleasure to chat with Matthew before as part of Creator’s Roulette when we explored his thoughts on immersion. Matthew is a science fiction and fantasy writer based in London, UK. Let’s learn about Parasites which is a solarpunk / hopepunk science fiction.
I have seen Parasites categorized under hard science fiction. What is the hard science fiction genre in your mind?
I’ve got to admit, it was never my intention to set Parasites up as a hard sci-fi novel. In my mind, hard sci-fi is all about detail; presenting concepts in-depth so that they seem to be within the realms of possibility – like the Three Body Problem series, for example. I tend to find that hard sci-fi novels either lose their plausibility as they try to ramp things up, or that they focus so much on the detail that they lose pace and plotting. I wanted to make Parasites accessible and comprehensible, but I totally understand why it could be characterized as hard sci-fi!
How did the idea of this book come to you?
I’m not entirely sure. I had firm philosophical thoughts about the ending, but also started somewhere in the middle: I had an idea about characters racing against time to make it through wormholes / thinnings / portals, with something terrible about to happen if they didn’t, and that became the Stormworld. Things evolved quite organically after that – Carthusian started as just a space station and became something much more interesting later on, but I really can’t place one single source of inspiration for Lyra, Kael or Alessia!
I have been thinking of the thinning kind of like wormholes that blend time and space. The closest book that I can think of that had a similar concept was The Fold by Peter Clines. What are some of your inspirations for science fiction, particularly when it comes to inter-dimensional travel?
I feel like wormholes and dimensional rifts have fallen out of fashion in sci-fi recently –you used to come across them all the time in series like Star Trek, but most of my inspiration really came from the fantasy genre. Books featuring alternate worlds played a big part in the books I read when I was growing up, from Alice in Wonderland to Rebecca’s World and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, to books I loved in my teens by the likes of David Gemmell, Clive Barker and Jan Siegel. I wanted to explore the idea in a sci-fi setting, but without using them ‘just’ as a lazy way to travel long distances! Clearly, they are a way to travel long distances, but since the Lyrans don’t have space travel, that distance is broadly irrelevant – although it becomes more pertinent in later books…
Did you consider connecting different parts of the universe, rather than different universes?
Yes, and there were a few reasons why I didn’t: primarily, I felt like it’d been done before and I wanted to do something a bit different. I also wanted to make the scope of Parasites bigger, and linking universes rather than just worlds also allows us to have a system for why the universes are linked. Again, more on this in future books!
The Lyran society is very structured and depends heavily on rules. What kind of considerations did you have to keep in mind when designing it?
This was a tough one; I’d imagined the Lyran society as developing in a hostile, resource-poor world, and even allowing for a bit of human folly, they’ve had to be really strict about their world and their laws because they’re operating on the tiniest margins of error. After generations, this has become both bound in law and their national character, with everyone extremely risk averse and cautious. However, my main concern was that this could make for quite boring characters for the reader, which made offsetting Kael and Alessia’s care and diligence with the other characters, as well as interesting worlds, extremely important.
Can you tell us more about the Lyran education system? As a teacher, that is always an interesting aspect of being introduced to a new society.
It’s minimal and intensive. The focus for Lyrans is ensuring that they make the most of their resources, and that life continues, so any extraneous study is discouraged unless it’s extremely focused. There are no universities, for example, although there are research labs. School starts at age four and continues until sixteen – after that, young Lyrans get a well-supervised work placement that runs for at least six months, but then they’re considered adults. There’s a heavy vocational focus in the Lyran education system – although everyone comes out able to read, write and add up, you’re also taught very practical skills like cooking, machine / vehicle maintenance, making and mending your own clothes, repairing and tending to your own home – all Lyrans are their own plumbers and electricians, for example! The education system is also streamlined to feed people into work, so the city where you’re based also heavily dictates the kind of teaching that you receive – in Vulpes, the centre of Lyran food production, for example, you’d be more likely to get lessons on farming, running food production machinery and so on.
Though I enjoyed all the stops on Alessia and Kael’s journey, Carthusian was the one that the most fascinating to me. Can you share more about the history of this place and if you would be pursuing it in another book?
Thank you! I’m glad you liked it – it was my favourite too. It was built by two long-lived species, the ‘Old Ones’ and their proteges, who lived on a planet called Diapha. There were very few of the Old Ones, and each was gifted with a highly specific skill that seems to transcend the laws of conventional physics. One of the Old Ones, Irial, the maker-goddess, was possessed with a desire to help the Diaphans escape the contracting universe, and she petitioned her fellows to plan and build a space-city that might be able to do just this. The process took many years, but the Old Ones had also created a race of sentient machines, the Horologia, to help and act as guards against their bitter enemies, the Ethereals, who are vast, spiky, fleshy abominations. At the last moment, the Ethereals stole Carthusian, and the Old Ones vanished, leaving the Diaphans and the Horologia to board and try to re-claim Carthusian. A few of the Diaphans had acquired skills similar to the Old Ones, and used them to try and keep their people safe; with the Old Ones gone, they couldn’t rely on the Horologia, and were hopelessly outmatched. The space city eventually fell into a slowly decaying orbit around a planet hundreds of years later, and the three species – with the Diaphans dividing themselves into three different factions – trying their best to survive. More on this in the sequel!
What role does instinct and training play in exploring space?
They play a huge role; a significant proportion of why Kael and Alessia are so successful at what they do is because they’ve rigorously trained themselves and their instincts to be systematic, to operate within rules and to be careful. When a situation surprises them, they don’t waste time panicking – they initiate process. It sounds boring, but when you’re encountering novel situations every time you travel through a new thinning, panicking doesn’t serve a purpose.
If a reader could take one thing away from this story, what would you want it to be?
Without giving too much away, or being too tangential, a lot of this book was a slightly sideways take on kindness, balance and humanity for me.
The Lyrans are a kind people, but they’re a people without much hope, and have become incredibly inward-looking; it’s understandable when they’re living in almost perpetual fear of extinction. Kael and Alessia’s entire trip is made – at Alhambro’s behest – in the hope that one day, they’ll be able to live for today, rather than squirreling everything away for tomorrow.
In Avengers: Age of Ultron, Vision sums it up well by saying “A thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts”, and I think sometimes we lose track of that. We try to act as if we’ll never die, as if we can take all of our money with us when we do, and forget about everyone and everything else in the process. If we can embrace beauty and remember to be kind, then whatever and whenever the end is, we’ll know we’ve lived well. It’s Brandon Sanderson’s ‘journey before destination’ again; it’s important to have hope for the future, but it’s equally important to get there in a way that we’re proud of, by living and acting well today.
Hope you enjoyed this interview with Matthew! Find him on Twitter, Instagram and Goodreads.
** Parasites is now out in stores so get a copy and let me know what you think! **
Amazon Print
Amazon Kindle
(available on Kindle Unlimited)
Cover image on Unsplash
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