We chat with author Karin Lowachee about The Mountain Crown, which is an epic dragon-rider quest where Empress of Salt and Fortune meets Temeraire.
Hi, Karin! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
Hi, thank you for these questions! I was born in Guyana, in South America. My ancestry is a mix of Chinese, Indian, and Portuguese. I grew up predominantly in Canada and was fortunate to be able to live and work in the Canadian Arctic for a time. I love history, film, science (especially astrophysics) and I spend much of my time when I’m not writing as a harried but grateful butler to a rescued black cat.
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
Some of my earliest memories are of writing and drawing. I’m talking when I was 4 or 5 years old. I never stopped since then. One of the first stories I ever wrote (and illustrated) was about a family of dragons.
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading: It’s a toss up between Beatrix Potter and Paddington.
- The one that made you want to become an author: The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. I read it in Grade 6 and specifically recall wanting at that point to publish.
- The one that you can’t stop thinking about: The Border Trilogy (so it’s actually 3 books: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain) by Cormac McCarthy. He breaks so many of those arbitrary literary “rules” and changed me as both a reader and a writer.
Your latest novella, The Mountain Crown, is out October 8th! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Literary frontier fantasy with dragons.
What can readers expect?
I’m a big ally of immersing the reader in the world of my writing the same way you would be immersed if you stepped off a plane in a foreign country and can’t quite speak the language. Speculative fiction possesses the bold opportunity to truly make the reader confront a different world, and this discomfort of not quite knowing where you are for a while, and the effort and patience you need to learn a new culture, is a positive thing. If you go along with the story, the mood, and the idea that you’re in a different place altogether, learning the characters like you would someone you just met, but not expecting to know them inside-out, I think the experience will be worth it.
Where did the inspiration for The Mountain Crown come from?
Not from any single source. I tend to write about things that I just love, because that’s where the enthusiasm and passion come into play, which you need to sustain a project as long as a novel (which the 3 novellas amount to in page number). I always wanted to write a dragon story for adults and the more I explored that simple concept, the more the idea expanded. Dragons as an indelible part of nature, and people as an indelible part of the natural world, became the core of my interest to tell the story. Then there were slippery little questions that snuck in there, like: What if “magic” evolved like science? What if the fundamental “magic” was an atomic connection to nature and it wasn’t codified with incantations and spellbooks and talismans? What if a whole culture evolved from that? If you could “feel” or “know” nature on an atomic level, destruction of it would be anathema. On a more prosaic level, since I love history, I’ve had a longstanding interest in the “frontier” era, basically the 19th century to the early 20th century. That transition in history is fascinating (and disturbing), and we’re still living the consequences today. From that, I did a deep dive into the Gold Rush of North America. Going to Alaska and a bit into the Yukon influenced me greatly where that’s concerned.
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
I loved exploring the relationship between my protagonists and the dragons, or what’s called the “suon” in my story. Having actually not read much when it comes to fantasy and dragons, all I knew was I wanted them to be unique to my world. Animal behavior has always fascinated me since I was a child and living with a strong personality in my cat has been a boon. She is so completely Cat and nothing I do will ever dissuade her or change her from being 100% Cat, and life is much easier for me when I accept that. I feel animals are 100% exactly who they are, all of the time, and if you interact with an animal you’re in their world, in their minds, and when we try to drag them into our world, that’s where dissonance and conflict happens. So depicting the suon with unique characteristics to their species, and not dressing them up as basically humans with wings and scales, was important to me. I wanted to really show them as who and what they are, not what the people in my story think they are. I tried to remove the “human gaze” and basically be the Jane Goodall for my suon. I didn’t want to anthropomorphize them, even to the point that their “language,” though slightly familiar, was still in some way confounding. It’s meant to suggest a language, rather than be a 1:1 translation that’s completely understood. How the people communicate with the suon is as much about feeling, impression, and context (along with body language) as it is about the words, so it was a fun challenge to try to convey that without being too overt. I thought about how I communicate with my cat and how she communicates with me. There is no “English” happening, but somehow we understand each other on multiple levels, but never completely. That bond is an incredible thing to experience with an animal and I wanted to somehow convey that with my dragons.
Can you tell us about your process when it comes to worldbuilding?
I think there’s fundamentally only one process, and that is to ask questions. You have to be the lead detective to your own idea. The more you interrogate yourself on the what, why, where, how, and who, the more your world will expand. That doesn’t mean you have to know everything (and you certainly don’t put it all on the page). I’m a believer in the power of the unconscious, and that it both influences your knowing (and therefore what you put on the page) and what the reader picks up on. There’s a process that happens when you read fiction: it’s a gathering of clues and an understanding of absences – if the reader has an open mind and doesn’t want everything spelled out like a Wikipedia article. The same goes for the writer. I like to infuse my world with specific characteristics that affect mood and tone, and from that aggregate you get an impression of the world the same way you do when you travel to a different country. You’re not going to fully understand another culture you weren’t born into, but you can still navigate it to some degree if you have an open mind. I like it when readers still have questions about the world and characters when they’re finished reading. You should. I still have questions about my world that may or may not be answered depending on where I put my focus. It’s a fine balance, of course, but I’d rather walk that wire than write something so obvious that it strips the sense of wonder from the experience.
What’s next for you?
The rollout for the 3 novellas will take me well into 2025. In the meantime, I’ve written a romantasy that was pure joy to put on the page and totally out of my regular wheelhouse. I loved the challenge of stepping into a genre I don’t normally write in, as I never want to restrict myself. Think Pride & Prejudice with a dash of The Last Kingdom, but make it queer. I also always have at least two more ideas waiting to be developed, one of which is a novel set in the world of The Mountain Crown. I’ll soon be in the process of deciding what I’ll focus on next.
Lastly, what books have you enjoyed so far this year and are there any that you can’t wait to get your hands on?
There are so many books I want to read, it’s criminal. I think we all know that plight. I’ve been writing so furiously since basically last Christmas, I haven’t read as much as I want. I managed to finish Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, which is over 1000 pages. That should count for three books. It was a trip and I love his left-of-center storytelling. I’m dying to read Mirrored Heavens by Rebecca Roanhorse, since I blew through Black Sun and Fevered Star last year. I have House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski burning a hole on my shelf. And I can’t wait to get to Cormac McCarthy’s last novel(s) The Passenger and Stella Maris.
