Welcome back to the Fantasy Hive, M L Wang, and congratulations on the upcoming publication of Blood Over Bright Haven. To start us off, what can readers expect? Tell us a little about your new book. 

Thanks for having me back!

Blood Over Bright Haven is a dark fantasy that plays with familiar tropes around magic and academia in what I hope is an interesting way. The protagonist is the first woman to enter an ancient order of mages, and we follow her as the pursuit of her goals takes her deep into the disturbing realities of power in her society.

If you know me from The Sword of Kaigen, Bright Haven is more compact than that one, lower on action scenes, and higher on all-nighters in the library.

Let’s talk about Sciona, your protagonist. In a strictly patriarchal society, she’s carving a path in her field, becoming the first female highmage. Tell us more about how important these stories still are.

Stories about women fighting their way upward through patriarchal systems will obviously be important—instructive, cautionary, inspirational, all that—for as long as gendered discrimination exists. However, I don’t consider Bright Haven a straightforwardly feminist narrative. At least, that’s not what I was aiming for. Instead, I tried to get into why the trailblazer—the exceptional woman who finds a way to thrive within a sexist hierarchy—is not necessarily equipped to tackle the injustices that hierarchy creates. At worst, she is complicit. Did she really carve out that trail for women or was it just for herself?

And were there any particular female pioneers you had in mind when writing Sciona?

Since I consider Sciona to be more antiheroine than heroine, I wouldn’t put her in a category with women I genuinely admire. That said, I did draw the particulars of her experience in the workplace from women close to me who have worked in male-dominated fields at various times from the 1980s to now. 

The figure I had in mind when I wrote Sciona was the #girlboss feminist who sees her own pursuit of power as an inherent good. She uses her own experience of sexism to justify her ascent at the expense of others, including men and women more vulnerable than herself. She doesn’t bother to think carefully about the ethics of her actions until that veil of righteousness tears and forces the revelation. Her development from that point is messy but also a spoiler, so we’ll leave it there.

I was trying to be careful with these questions to avoid spoilers, it’s tricky with this book though!

Your magic system this time round is super complex; mages use a machine to type up spells and siphon energy to power them. It put me in mind of computer coding, was this intentional? What were your inspirations behind your magic system? 

I built Bright Haven’s magic system based on the function I wanted it to serve in the story’s central metaphor. I’m not a good coder, by any means (I believe my highest grade in a college CS class was a C+) but that influence was there.

Sciona’s work in the university, and that of the highmages, is closely intertwined with their religion; academia and religion go hand in hand in this world. Without spoiling too much, could you tell us more about what you wanted to explore here?

This is difficult to discuss without spoilers. Short answer: any cult leader who knows what he’s doing is going to appoint himself the mouthpiece of an omniscient god and give that god the last word on everything. This is just evil common sense.

As for what I wanted to explore… Religion is just one piece of this, but it’s always bothered me that the culture of academia—including dark academia as a genre—fetishizes the aesthetics of Western elitism. So, I wanted to look at the way imperial powers benefit from tying the aesthetics of their culture—which inevitably include their religious iconography and ideals—to the concepts of intelligence, knowledge, reason, and progress. “This is how an educated person dresses,” “This is how an intelligent person speaks,” “This is what a place of knowledge looks like,” “This is the sort of package truth comes in,” conveniently excluding any expression of truth that falls outside the image of the ruling class. Thus, education itself becomes an exercise in assimilation. The knowledge seeker has to absorb the norms of the oppressor to get where they want to go. And this is how we get tweed blazers, cathedrals, and ahistorical marble statues as shorthand for truth itself.

As I said, evil common sense.

There are some wonderfully philosophical moments in the book, especially between Sciona and her assistant, outsider Thomil. They argue about morality; did you find yourself ever falling too deeply into these arguments? Did you ever have to pull it back at all?

I’m glad you enjoyed those argument scenes, since I considered those a gamble in terms of reader retention. When I write dialogue, I try to fall into a naturalistic flow, with one idea following the next in my best approximation of a real conversation. This usually results in first drafts that take too long to get to the point because the characters have doubled back several times to cover all the necessary subject matter. While doubling back is realistic, it isn’t efficient storytelling, so editing these sections means identifying repetition and trying to consolidate my bullet points without losing the organic feel of the exchange. It’s a tough balance to strike.

In this book, lacking the action scenes I normally use to break up the monotony of dialogue, I do feel like I strained the limits of my talking scenes. That is, even after editing down, I think they’re about as long as dialogue scenes can be without compromising the story’s pacing—although this is obviously subjective. I did my best.

Blood Over Bright Haven has been described as Dark Academia; did you set out to write a Dark Academia story, or did the genre click into place after?

Bright Haven had its premise and outline before it had its setting. Since that premise hinged on a scholar uncovering a conspiracy through research, it was always going to be dark academia in the definitional sense. However, it was late in the outlining process that I decided to go with a Western gaslamp setting, locking in the aesthetic trappings of dark academia as most understand the genre. I chose this setting for simplicity’s sake; not wanting to burden the narrative with heavy world-building, I went for a backdrop most English-speaking readers would be familiar with. This decision ended up being boring for me, creatively, but I think it suits the story.

Are there any particular books or authors who influenced Blood Over Bright Haven? 

I’m so sorry I keep coming up empty on these questions about influences, but not really. As someone who doesn’t read a lot of modern dark academia, I wasn’t aiming for the style of any work in particular. Instead, I was just trying to create a story that helped me explore the questions that preoccupied me at the time.

Now, while I didn’t have a specific work of fiction in mind when I conceived Bright Haven, I did have specific fantasy tropes in mind. Of these, the trope I fixated on the most was the hard, cost-based magic system—the way this type of system usually functions in fantasy versus the way I see power functioning in real life. And that’s all I can say on magic systems without spoilers.

Are you planning anything fun to celebrate your new release? Do you have any upcoming virtual events our readers may be interested in?

This interview is my virtual event. I’m doing my best to stay offline and limit my public existence to the books I release. So, if I’m honest, I hope people don’t look for me online and let my books stand on their own.

If you could study at any fictional university or school, which one would you attend and what subject would you study?

I’m actually really glad to not be in school anymore, so the real answer is probably none. If I have to enrol somewhere, take me to a magic school from a kids’ franchise where death is rare, the mood is light, and the magic is soft enough to allow for inventive shenanigans. Alfea from Winx Club—the original cartoon, not the Netflix one. Maybe Monster High. (Note: if this is your speed, you might want to check out my Volta Academy Chronicles after Blood Over Bright Haven). But a real university with homework? You’ll never take me alive.

Finally, what is the one thing you hope readers take away from your writing?

I’ve already come close to breaking this rule in this interview, but in general, I don’t love spelling out the intended theses of my books. Partly because it feels like taking some of the fun out of reading; partly because, from an integrity perspective, I think the burden should fall on the writing itself to be clear about its themes; partly because I’m drawn to questions without easy answers, which often opens up multiple conflicting takeaways. So, you were kind enough to let me blather about girlboss feminism and the conflation of aesthetics with truth, but those don’t have to be a reader’s primary takeaways just because that’s what I had on the brain today. Questions of power are more complicated than that.

The best I can do is create a book that reflects my angst at the time of writing and hope it resonates. If I’m being ambitious, I hope my stories foster empathy, curiosity, and critical thinking about the complex power structures at play in our lives. At my heart, though, I’m a silly genre fiction girl, and I’ll settle for making you feel something.

Blood Over Bright Haven is out today! You can pre-order your copy on Bookshop.org