Speculative World-Building as a Refracting Prism: An Interview with Rebecca F. Kuang

Speculative World-Building as a Refracting Prism:An Interview with Rebecca F. Kuang Ifeoluwa Adeniyi and Rebecca F. Kuang Rebecca F. Kuang is the author of the fantasy novels The Poppy War, The Dragon Republic, and The Burning God. Her upcoming novel Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution will be released in August 2022. Ifeoluwa Adeniyi is completing her PhD in the Department of English, Theatre, Film, and Media, University of Manitoba. Her research explores the politics of death in feminist Afrofuturist writings by Black women. Ifeoluwa is a lecturer in the English Department at the University of Winnipeg where she teaches literature and creative writing. IA: Thank you for agreeing to do this interview. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading your novel, The Poppy War, and I was fascinated by your style and your characters. Your characters especially are so memorable, so relatable, and so real even when they seem to dwell in a bizarre phantasmagorical world. I'm wondering if you could speak to what made you write, why you write, and when you discovered that you want to write. RK: I can't remember a time when I was sentient and not writing. When I was in elementary school, I was so enthralled with Star Wars that I stapled together pages of printer paper to create my own illustrated novel about the adventures of Luke Skywalker during his childhood on Tatooine (featuring myself, of course, as his author—insert girlfriend). In high school, I kept open a massive file where I jotted down scenes about teenagers zooming around on hover boards in a postapocalyptic [End Page 119] world engaged in some nebulous resistance against some nebulous authoritarian state. The plot and world-building weren't important; this alternate universe was only a backdrop for me to play out my own fantasies and anxieties at fifteen. I wrote the girl I had a crush on as the love interest for the main character. I wrote the history teacher I liked into a mentor figure for the heroes. So writing, for me, has always been about sorting out what's fascinating or bothering me—making sense of the world by recreating the same issues I'm struggling with in a speculative world and watching the pieces interact. I never considered writing professionally until I went to China between my sophomore and junior years. I had finally become fluent in Mandarin that year, and I was having conversations with grandparents who I hadn't spoken much to since I immigrated to the States as a toddler. I was struck by the stories they told me about their experiences during the vicissitudes of the past century. I was amazed by all they had survived. I wanted to record all of their words somehow, but as an undergraduate, I didn't have the training or abilities to do the research required to write a family autobiography. So I did what I've always done—tried to make sense of events by recreating them in a fictional setting. That's still why I write. Historical events are so abstract when you read about them in a classroom environment. In the study of China's WWII, for example, it feels so antiseptic to talk about things like war crimes, occupation, collaboration, and sacrifice from a bird's eye view. It removes all the messiness, the nuance and complexity. Writing fiction lets me try to see the world from the perspectives of actors whose decisions I don't initially understand; it puts the humanity back in history. IA: This is so interesting, that you grew up immersed in science fiction, and then going to China compelled you to want to write in the professional sense of the word. Have you ever considered your investment and talent in imagining new worlds as partly cultivated through the experiences of transnational immigration? I find this an interesting way to subvert the idea that SSF [science fiction and fantasy] is escapist; rather, it most closely captures the cultural frictions of transnational migration. RK: Certainly, especially since consuming SFF pop culture was one of my entry points into understanding American culture. I immigrated...