We chat with author Emery Robin about The Sea Eternal, which is the spectacular sequel to the epic, interstellar love story that began in The Stars Undying.
Hi, Emery! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
Hi, Nerd Daily! I’m a trans New Yorker and a paralegal. I like Old English poetry and campy propaganda posters. As a child, I wanted to grow up to be one of the lions guarding the New York Public Library, but being an author comes close enough.
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
I’m lucky enough to come from a wordy family: my mother was an English teacher, my grandmother was a librarian, and my grandfather was a jobbing writer in Hollywood. I was also lucky enough to grow up around the corner from my local library, where they’d stock series like Animorphs or Bailey School Kids or Oz with a dozen more books—but they’d only be able to carry two or three entries, and the entries would be all out of order. It never occurred to me that I wasn’t supposed to come up with the “missing material” on my own!
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading: My Father’s Dragon, by Ruth Stiles Gannett, which my preschool kept in a back room for kids who wouldn’t go to sleep at naptime. (I’m still a terrible sleeper today, so maybe they shouldn’t have encouraged that?)
- The one that made you want to become an author: Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott—I always wanted to spend my life writing stories, but Jo March made me understand that it was a real job that grown-ups did.
- The one that you can’t stop thinking about: A Place of Greater Safety, by Hilary Mantel. Who did it like her.
The Sea Eternal is the second installment in your Empire Without End series and it’s out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Antony and Cleopatra IN SPACE!
What can readers expect?
True love, high adventure, quests of vengeance, direst captivity, Hell, the Blessed Isles, rains of fire, high-speed chases through the stars, a disco on the moon, a very miserable wedding, a few easy descents down into Avernus and a few struggles to climb back up again—and a final battle over how, and by whom, the story is told.
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring further?
Last book, I was drawing mostly from the most famous writings about Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, which are by Plutarch and Shakespeare; in this book, I got to expand my pool of literary references a lot more, though I can’t say how without spoilers!
This book also let me play with formatting and formal elements—it has some epistolary portions, which were an absolute blast, and some other stylistic weirdnesses that are also spoilers. It also gave me an opportunity to do a sci-fi adaptation of the ancient Parthian Empire (Rome’s biggest rival), which is a really under-discussed topic and such a fun one; we spend a lot of time with two members of the court, very nasty and very funny people who get to cause all kinds of chaos for our heroes.
Did you face any challenges whilst writing? How did you overcome them?
Any historical sources about Cleopatra are very warped by the forces of Roman propaganda, and the story becomes more and more warped the closer you come to Antony and Cleopatra’s war with Rome—partially in that it flattens her into a vampy villain, of course, but also in that it was easier and more fun for the Caesars to sell the war as all about the romance (and about the “seductive power of the foreign Other”, one of the earliest and most influential uses of that kind of messaging) than it was for the Caesars to be a little more honest about the power struggles going on in the death throes of republican government, their own colonial interests, that sort of thing. So it’s my job to look past the Roman story and see things from a wider scope and from the colonies’ point of view; but on the other hand, I’m a storyteller rather than a historian, so I have to take that bird’s-eye view, bring it back down to earth, and help you feel and see things as individual human beings feel and see them. And also, the romance did happen, and I happen to think it’s fascinating, and I want to show it! It was extremely tricky to figure out how to balance these—the first draft of the book was from about six different points of view and had dozens of flashbacks, and I had to really boil things down to finish the story I had begun in The Stars Undying.
What’s next for you?
I have a few projects on the go—there’s a very odd story about Sir Gawain from Arthurian literature in which I’m trying to play with the language of some of the very old fantasy authors (William Morris and Lord Dunsany), there’s a more lighthearted fantasy novel about con artists that I’ve had on the back-burner for years, there’s a short story about Tam Lin at a New York punk rock club. We’ll see what fights to the front!
Lastly, what books are you looking forward to picking up this year?
Wen-yi Lee’s When They Burned the Butterfly, a fantasy novel about a girl gang in post-colonial Singapore that I’ve been absolutely dying to get my hands on; The Maiden and Her Monster by Maddie Martinez, which I’m expecting to be my favorite Jewish fantasy since Spinning Silver; and I’m really looking forward to what Emily Tesh will make of dark academia in The Incandescent. But if I’m honest I’m probably going to spend a lot of the year finishing Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series.
