Seth Dickinson and Kameron Hurley are the respective authors of The Traitor Baru Cormorant and Empire Ascendant, two of the biggest fantasy releases of the fall, and certainly two of the most fearless when it comes to challenging the tropes of “traditional epic fantasy.” Protagonists of color, explorations of gender, a wide range of sexualities…these are not your dad’s Tolkien books.

We recently sat down with Seth and Kameron for a wide-ranging discussion of their work, the current climate for progressive storytelling within genre, and which one of them is more evil (spoiler: they disagree). Our conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Kameron, I’ll start with you, since your blog post introduced me to Seth’s book. How did you first encounter his work?

Kameron: [Tor editor] Marco Palmieri e-mailed my agent with a pitch, and said, “Hey, it’s this amazing political thriller about someone who’s basically getting up through the inside of the empire, and wants to destroy it from the inside, and has to give up all of these things. It’s a geopolitical thriller/tragedy.” It was basically right up my alley. Once I finished, I told Marco this. Marco’s like “Oh it’s so great that you read that book so quickly.” I said “That was made for me.” I was like “Marco you made that pitch letter just for me.” I read it real quickly, sent a blurb off to him, and started talking about it fairly quickly.

I feel like you started the buzz on it that has built since then. Seth, what’s it like for you, a debut author, to have your book be one that suddenly people are talking about, calling it, “one of the most anticipated fantasies of the fall”? Do you feel like that’s true?

Seth: It’s all crap.

You don’t believe your own hype?

Seth: That’s an interesting question; do I believe my own hype? I think this is true of a lot of authors, even when you get harsh criticism: it is never as tough as the things you have thought about on your bad writing days, or late at night. I have never heard anything said about my work on the negative side that I have not already pondered for years. Which, it’s good to be your own worst critic, it helps you at least know what’s coming. But it can be tough too, because in terms of the hedonic value of other people saying your book is great, it’s almost like they’re just cranking up the foot, and you’re waiting for it to fall. The more nice things they say, like, “This is the fantasy debut of the year,” you’re like “But I know on page 247 I misconstructed sentence 3. The stanchion’s all wrong.”

But to answer your question specifically, I’m very happy people like the book. I had a lot of confidence in it. I knew writing it that it was coming together the way I wanted it, and I’m glad it’s seems to have found its audience. I’m really happy.

The book ticks along like a machine. I imagine as a writer, once you had done the hard work of assembling it, you got to the point where writing it was just like watching it roll downhill.

Seth: I knew the ending. The ending was the very first thing I knew, before the characters or anything else about the book. So I was able to write to that.

This might be awkward: Kameron has effusively praised you. Have you read her work?

Seth: I read God’s War several years ago because either Charlie Jane Anders or Emily Newitz talked about it on io9, and I picked it up shortly after that. I think on strength of the setting and the cover, and I really liked it.

Which is funny, because Kameron, you’ve said that cover…

Kameron: Didn’t sell any books. It sold a very niche amount of books. It was mostly just me; it was a lot of word of mouth that sold that book.

Seth: Well I think the other thing that really stuck with me from the interview was how gonzo your life story was. My thought was, “Wow she’s hardcore.”

I’ve read those posts, about how she was so sick while writing it that she almost died.

Kameron: I was literally dying while I wrote that book, yeah. It was one of those things. When I came back to it after I had come out of the hospital, I looked at it and I was like, “This is a hot mess.” On the one hand it was great, because I had all the weird, crazy things that were thrown in there while I was dying. But then I could come back to it not dying, and then put a narrative in to it. But it is still, structure wise, I am down on it a lot about that. Structure wise it’s not the best plot and narrative. That’s not what it’s about. A lot of people are like “It’s the passion, and it’s the weirdness,” and…yeah.

I think I like that. The rawness of it. You can tell it’s less considered, and somehow that makes it more…interesting and immediate.

Seth: Yes. I have no actual language-related synesthesia, but Kameron’s books always strike me as really vivid. They have this color palate that’s much wider than most other books. There’s more blood, and more fluids. More vegetation.

Everyone has said this already, but when I saw Mad Max: Fury Road the first thing I thought was of your books.

Kameron: Right, yeah, God’s War movie. I saw that, and I was like, “Okay when’s the God’s War movie?”

Without spoiling anything about either of your books, you’ve each written books that are incredibly brutal both physically and emotionally, and have written scenes that made me kind of disgusted at myself for reading something that made me feel so terrible. Kameron, we talked about the scene in Infidel earlier.

Kameron: Yes, the scene.

Seth: Is this the famous well scene?

Kameron: The well scene.

The well scene.

Kameron: Everyone talks of the well scene.

Have you read it?

Seth: I haven’t. I’m a true participant in Kameron Hurley’s career in that I didn’t buy the second two God’s War books.

Kameron: People are actually buying the back list now, which is actually really cool. Now that The Mirror Empire has done well, they’re going back and buying all three of them. “Oh finally, you’re all reading the second and third books five years later, thank you.” Yeah.

So now I want you each to argue why the other one is more evil of a writer.

Kameron: Oh my God. No this is great, I actually e-mailed my agent after finishing the book, and I said, “Hannah this character is way more evil than Lilia in Mirror Empire.” Because actually my idea with Lilia is turning someone into a person who has to do a lot of horrible things, and I think that’s also what drew me to Baru. But I was like, “Hannah I couldn’t be this horrible to her.” I was like “I couldn’t do it.” She said,”You’re a liar; no way is this book even worse.” And she ended up reading it too, and I got an e-mail from her halfway through and she’s like, “You’re right, she’s way worse than Lilia.”

Seth: Is that… That’s the totality of your argument?

Kameron: That’s it; that’s all I got.

Seth: That I’m a meaner author?

Kameron: That you’re a meaner author.

Seth: I think Kameron is a much meaner author. And I have a very articulate, intelligent reason why. Which is exactly that, we have this hang up on individual morality, but the overall logic of Kameron’s worlds is much more brutal. So, specifically I’m gonna talk about The Mirror Empire. If you look at the history of both the major worlds in the story, things have been f***ed up and cyclically oppressive for centuries. Every single civilization in there has had its turn being the s****y empire rolling over the other people, and what’s so great about it is that all of them have legitimate reasons to resent each other over something that happened in the past, which is very, very true to the real world.

Kameron: You have a genocidal empire as well.

Seth: I have one, but in Baru’s world there are significant chunks of the recent past, and even significant chunks of the current geopolitical status quo, that are decent places to live as a woman, as a person of color, by Baru’s standards. Obviously their racial map is different than ours. But as a racial power minority, as a queer person, there are places you can go in her world, and I talk about these things because in Baru’s world these are the axes of oppression that matter. Which is not always true of Kameron’s world.

In Baru’s world, I’m interested in looking at a historical moment. In a lot of fantasy you see systems of oppression very similar to the modern world, and they’re treated as if they’ve always been there. And my interest is in saying, “Hey these systems developed at a historical point, and maybe it could have gone a different way.” So I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say the overall arc of my series is about how one individual person can do a series of individually morally reprehensible things, but her aim is to get the world back to a pretty sunny place. Maybe a place, I think, that is better than what we’ve achieved in the real world so far.

Kameron is just mean though, and her worlds are—

Kameron: It never gets better, yeah. And that’s interesting, because my axes of oppression are very, very different. I love the multiplicities of societies, and my version of oppression is not who you sleep with, necessarily. It’s who do you go to war with, who enslaved whom at which point in time, and all of that. But I don’t see the happy ending. There’s a lot of keeping to the status quo just actually to survive. “I am just trying to survive in this horrible, horrible world and I don’t anticipate that the world’s going to get any better. But I’m gonna try and make it not get any worse.” Particularly, Nix in the God’s War books was like, “Well I don’t want to let it get worse.” But there was no better; she didn’t really see a better. Possibly the war will end, but will that be better? I don’t know.

I’m going to gets into the weeds here a little bit, so: I’m probably not misjudging anything to say that you are both white.

Kameron: [laughs] Yes.

But both of you also write books with tons of people of color; people with different gender identities; people with different sexual identities; and queer themes play a big role. Why is it important to you to incorporate those elements in to your worlds?

Kameron: Well, for me, it was finally understanding the way the world actually is, as opposed to the way the world was presented to me by the media. That came about, I think, when I went to [the Clarion Writers’ Workshop]. When I was 20 I started to do a lot of traveling; I started to read outside the genre; I started to expose myself to what the world was actually like. And I realized that if I kept writing the hegemonic narrative of, “Oh white guy in space goes off to blah, blah, blah colonize the aliens,” I was actually contributing to a very violent narrative of erasure, right? I wanted to actually portray the world as it really was, and in order to do that, obviously, the world is not just full of white people who are all straight, clearly.

Maybe if we were one one of the Star Trek planets.

Kameron: Right, exactly. So I went out and I actively said, “Okay, if I’m writing fantasy, if I have this huge sandbox, I need to play with all the pieces in it.” And that is going forth into the actual world, and bringing back those pieces, and building something new, and crazy, and different, and awesome with them.

Seth: My answer’s pretty similar. I think we have a moral responsibility to try to strip away the hegemonic mask and look at the world as it’s actually been throughout history and today. Which is much, much more complicated than what most of fantasy is engaged with. I knew very early on writing my book that I was going to argue about how a lot of fantasy—how a lot of this narrative came to be. Which is why I chose to use the same axes of oppression that matter in the world today, and a lot of the same mechanisms; though not exactly the same. Because I wanted to lurk around how they pop up in our stories; what narratives maintain them; how those narratives can be infiltrated.

More than that, I would point at Daniel José Older’s list of rules in the essay about writing “the Other.” I think there’s been a ton of great criticism written about this, and that’s kind of what I want to point to. We don’t come to these realizations just on our own; there’s a conversation happening.

Do you worry when you’re, as you say, writing the other that you’re appropriating, or you’re telling a narrative that is not yours to tell? Is that something that sort of keeps you awake at night?

Kameron: Well, here’s the thing, is that reading is an incredibly personal experience, right? So you can never invalidate a reader’s response to your work. Does it keep me up at night? Absolutely. When the God’s War books came out, there was tons of very insightful, wonderful criticism written about them. I did my research to the best of my ability. I created a society that was intricate and complex to the best of my ability. I still did some things wrong, and people pointed them out to me, and honestly were doing me a huge favor. I listened.

I think a lot of writers don’t do that; they take these things very personally, and they don’t listen to them, and get better. And if you looked at the God’s War books, I really did take a lot of that criticism and change some of the things that I was going to do based on that. Because I realized, “Oh that’s right; that’s broken, and I don’t want to perpetuate a broken thing.” So it has informed, like all of that stuff, all those voices have informed my writing going forward, and I certainly have gotten less of that as I’ve gone on.

You always have to be thinking about it, any time you’re telling a story about anyone. Whether it’s about yourself, because there are things that we ingest; or it’s about other people because there are ideas about other people that we ingest; and always seeking to do better. It’s like, you can either contribute to, again, this “white men in space” narrative, or you can try and do something really different. Doing something really different is incredibly scary, and it can be really terrifying; but doing the other thing is actually the worst, and most violent thing to do so.

Seth: Daniel José Older said, “For all that it is very scary and difficult, it is much better in most cases.” You should try. Being afraid of failing is not a good reason to not try, and what Kameron said about criticism I also think is really true. People who write criticism on the internet, as Kameron has done, are doing really valuable work. They’re signing up for risks; they’re targeted. They are putting themselves out there, and I’m glad when they do it; and also I think if you’re gonna deal with some of these issues you have to be open to criticism. You have to read; you have to leave the reader space to talk about it, to have a conversation. I actually have a lot of faith in the overall direction we’re headed. I think whatever we’re doing is working, even if slowly.

As a psychologist, there are very few things I trust to transcend any kind of ideology, or the blinders society puts on us. But I do think good, well designed science helps, and one of the things that science has taught me is that we all live inside an ideological construct. No one is ever going to not make a mistake. Everyone has something that they’re gonna screw up; some blind spot somewhere; and if you let that keep you from writing, you’re just turning the microphone over to people who don’t care.

Kameron: Yeah.

Seth: But yes it does keep me up at night in the literal sense.

I feel like we are in kind of a watershed moment, like you can point to things that happened in the ’60s and ’70s when like the New Wave came, and Joanna Russ books, and Samuel R. Delany. There were small moves, but for the most part genre sort of lumbered on as a homogenous mass—elves, and quasi-European narratives, and traditional sci-fi. But definitely in the last five years, we’re seeing books that are having a conversation with genre, and are trying to do something to comment on what people traditionally thought of as fantasy or sci-fi, and what you can do with it now, and engage with their worlds a little bit more. Do you think we’re at a tipping point or are we still approaching the cliff?

Kameron: I think we’re certainly having a moment. I think when N. K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms came out and did very well, I think that was a big signal to a lot of publishers that, “Yes you can make money with books that are not ‘Oh and now it’s the orcs and elves running off to go and hang out with the white guys.'” And she had a lot of trouble breaking in as well. But once she managed to jump that, things started to snowball. And just like in New Wave, we’re working within what’s going on in our own cultural paradigm, and we’re seeing a huge resurgence in the Civil Rights Movement. We’re seeing a very big interest in feminism, which of course was a bad word; you weren’t allowed to say it. It was over, and then Bad Feminist came out, and it was like, “Oh we’re all feminist.” So there’s a huge cultural shift that’s happening, and science fiction is a part of that. As with anything else, time is cyclical, the wheel of time turns, and I’m sure we’ll get back to a backlash. But we’re coming out of a very conservative backlash period, and I think we have a good 10 years to make some progress before we get smacked down again.

Seth: I do think when we have conversations about this about the present moment, and how we’re finally breaking this stuff, we risk erasing some people. If you look back at the books that came out 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago, 100 years ago, there have been texts that were pushing these issues all along. And we should not forget about them.

Of course. But that’s why I used the phrase “tipping point.” Are we at a point where it isn’t just the mavericks out there, pushing against the tide?

Kameron: God’s War was an almost literally an impossible sell when it came out, and I feel like if it would have came out two years it would have done even better. There have always been mavericks. There have always been the people who have led those cycles of change, and I think we are seeing one of those cycles of change right now, and yeah, I think it’s getting easier. For a little while here it’s going to get a lot easier for us to sell this kind of progressive work that was impossible to sell in 2008.

Seth: At the same time… So, in my research, I’ve studied the very small micro level expressions of behavior in neural activity that drive a lot of prejudice. To be a bit of a downer, I think we have a huge, huge amount of work still to do on this. Partly because I think people are programmed by the cultural bath around them, and if you look at something basic like movies and TV, and just look at the number of men versus women with speaking roles; the number of people of color with dialogue, we are so far from statistically representative. This is what frustrates me when people talk about quotas. If we were to randomly generate every single character in every bit of entertainment we have, just randomly pick a person in the world and model a character on them, that’s not a quota, that’s the null hypothesis, and we are so, so skewed from that. We are so far from it, and I’m glad we’re making progress. But if you just look at the raw numbers, which I think is a great, fair, objective metric, we have a lot of work to do. Which is part of the reason I guess made the—both of us probably, made the choice to load our books with characters of color.

Kameron: Yes, it’s like, what are we contributing to? Do you wanna wake up one day and be like, “I was Luke Skywalker,” and then find out you were actually like a stormtrooper for the Empire? No, I wanna be Luke Skywalker, f*** that.

The other day on Twitter, you said you want people to look back on you and say, “Ugh.”

Kameron: Yes! To be like, “That dinosaur!” And it’s already happening, which is great. A friend of mine told me, “Oh it’s so great, all the young feminists, they talk about you a lot in their blogs, and on their locked forums. Oh, they just have great conversations about all the things you’re doing wrong.” I’m like, “Yes, achievement unlocked.” I want to be the man, right, because if I’m the man, if I’m me, who supposedly is this terrible, horrible, raging feminist…

You’re the worst.

Kameron: I’m the worst, I’m full of rage. So if I become the man and the dinosaur, then that means we can rest, right? That means we’re moving on, and that’s what I want. So if in 30 years I’m a pariah and get tomatoes thrown at me, that’s fine, because hopefully that means that we’ve moved on, and I’ve been part of that, in helping that change.

So Kameron, you’re on book release number five. Do you have any advice for Seth as a debut author?

Kameron: Get out now, get out now! No it’s the same advice I give to everyone, and especially, it’s really hard after the first novel: persistence. Sometimes it sucks, sometimes it’s great, but the ones who succeed are simply the ones who stay in the game.

All right, I think that’s all the uncomfortable, confrontational questions I had.

Seth: What?

Kameron: We were ready.

Seth: We got warmed up.

Well, we’ve got plenty of material for people to get angry about on Twitter.

Seth: I just want everyone to be happy.

Kameron: You’re in the wrong profession.

The Traitor Baru Cormorant is available now. Empire Ascendant releases on October 6.