RF Kuang is a Marshall Scholar, Chinese-English translator, and the Astounding Award-winning and the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Award nominated author of the Poppy War trilogy and the forthcoming Babel. Her work has won the Crawford Award and the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel. She has an MPhil in Chinese Studies […]

Trouble the Waters is an anthology that gathers the tidal force of bestselling, renowned writers from Lagos to New Orleans, Memphis to Copenhagen, Northern Ireland and London, offering extraordinary speculative fiction tales of ancient waters in all its myriad forms. The editors spoke with Fantasy Magazine about the project and their relationships with Black speculative fiction.

Creativity is fragile. You can’t let many voices in because there’s always plenty of people who want to tear you down, not realizing your harshest critic is yourself. Or at least it is for me. So while I do sometimes read early reviews, I tend not to read anything about my work after it’s been released. It’s already gone through editors and a critique group and many, many drafts. And no work will ever be perfect or please everyone. It can only capture a moment in time for the author – who they were and what concerned then when they wrote it – and then we move on to what’s next.

We still get dreams, and we still have our memories. We still have, somewhere nestled deep within us, the capacity to make a peace for ourselves or to try and climb the umbilical cord back to God or whatever Higher Power can grant us that peace we cannot make for ourselves. If we didn’t have that ability, we might not have gotten the Harlem Ballroom scene and vogueing.

I began writing as a coping method, sneaking out of bed at night to work at my computer. I wasn’t sleeping much, anyway. This went on for a few years. I wasn’t doing it seriously, just writing what came to mind. There may have even been a novel attempt in there. I never showed anybody anything. It was just for me.

In The Jasmine Throne I wanted to explore shades of grey: ostensibly good people doing unjust things for their ideals; people choosing to become villains with their eyes open; the way power can unmake you and monster you. It’s also about unjust systems and cruel power hierarchies and—yes—love. But its characters don’t always choose the right path, and love doesn’t always have the power to save them.

I’d written poems as a kid, and I took poetry workshops as an undergrad at Berkeley. But I didn’t make a sustained effort at writing until my mid-twenties, after graduating from law school. Instead of studying for the bar exam, I found myself at the bookstore every day, reading story collections. Going into a new career as a lawyer, I think I was searching for a creative release valve, some private headspace I could carve out. So I started writing little things in the margins of notepads, or sending emails to myself with scraps of language. My first pieces were very short, weird experiments. I don’t even know you could call them stories.