Are you ready to travel into the future with Andra and Zhade, the two main characters in Goddess in the Machine? Do you need more information before diving into the dystopic future of Eerensed? Then read all that Lora Beth Johnson has to say about her upcoming novel in this Q&A. We talk with her about the influences that shaped the novel, her masterful use of plot-twists, and the compelling dialect she specifically created for her novel. Find out the deepest secrets of Goddess in the Machine now!
Hi, Lora Beth! Congratulations on the release of your first novel, Goddess in the Machine. First of all, can you tell us a bit about yourself?
Thank you so much! As you can probably tell from the plot of Goddess, I’m a huge sci-fi and fantasy nerd. I grew up on a healthy diet of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. When I’m not writing novels, I teach college English (mostly research-based writing courses). I don’t have a lot of free time, but when I do, I like trying my hand at paint-by-numbers or learning to play Dungeons & Dragons with my friends.
In three words, what can readers expect from your new book?
Sci-fi, fantasy… etymology?
Goddess in the Machine is a sci-fi novel full of plot twists. It is a rollercoaster of emotions and it works brilliantly, but where did everything start? What was the idea that kick-started everything? And what were your main influences?
I got the idea while I was working on a different project that I was struggling to stay interested in. That project was a generic secret space princess story, so I took what I loved about that premise and started repackaging it into something I could be excited about. I started exploring fairy tale tropes, like the sleeping princess, and remixed them with sci-fi elements I drew from places like Star Wars and Beth Revis’s Across the Universe. Very quickly, that sparked the idea of a girl waking up from stasis to a post-apocalyptic society centered around a prophecy that she would save them.
The world of Goddess in the Machine is beautifully and thoroughly developed, everything is obviously thought out to the smallest detail. How did you plan out your dystopic future? Do you think it is a possible outcome for humanity?
I think part of being a writer is constantly coming up with worst-case scenarios. A lot of the world of Goddess came from letting those scenarios play out to the destruction of society as we know it. The results, by necessity, shaped the world and its inhabitants (who survived). I had to ask myself how a society would function in that environment, after such massive losses of life, knowledge, and nature. I hope that’s not in our future. I think we have it in us as a species to destroy. But I also think that we have it in us to create something spectacular.
Technology and religion are one and the same in the reality of Eerensend, the futuristic city where Goddess in the Machine is set, when in our current time they are almost polar opposites. Why did you decide to base their system of beliefs in technology?
Religion is often based in faith and worship. In organized religion, the object of that faith and worship is usually a god or gods, but humans build religions around a lot of things, even if they don’t call it that. The Eerensedians are putting their faith in technology (what they call magic), and worshipping its immense power. Using that dichotomy was really the basis for me to explore how changing the name of something (ie: technology to magic, science to religion), changes how we interact with it.
The futuristic dialect used by Eerensedians and languages in general play a big part on the novel, why did you decide to create an entire new language for the book?
I developed a passion for linguistics in grad school and became especially interested in how language shapes reality. So I decided early in writing the book that I couldn’t have a world that exists 1000 years in the future and have the characters speaking 21st century English. Initially, I tried to make the dialect as accurate as possible to how English would evolve over 1000 years, and it was absolutely unreadable. So I compromised a bit, and created a pidgin-like dialect that borrowed from this future evolution of English, but relied pretty heavily on the English we speak today.
Most of the changes your dialect presents are a different use of affixes and changes in spelling due to pronunciation, but what was your course of action when building it and what rules and limitations did you impose on your linguistic creative process?
For the most part, I let the language develop naturally based on the culture. Language is socially constructed to meet the needs of the society that uses it, so there are very rarely hard-and-fast rules that apply across the board in any language. The only concession I made to that was to change all -ly words to -ish words. This is not typically how language evolves, but I wanted to give the reader something concrete to center them, as the rest of the dialect is a bit more fuzzy and fickle, as languages tend to be.
We know you are currently writing the sequel of Goddess in the Machine, but what are your plans for the future? Are you planning on trying out different genres?
I have some ideas that I’m really excited for but can’t say much about yet. In general, I’d love to explore lots of categories and media, but I think my brand of story-telling will always have a mix of sci-fi and fantasy.
Finally, imagine you wake up a thousand years into the future like Andra, which current books do you think would have become cult classics by then?
The idea behind what makes a cult classic is an interesting one, but I can’t even imagine what from today will have dedicated followings in 1000 years. Who even knows if they’ll have access to most of what we’re creating now? I really hope Star Wars is still around in some shape or form though.
