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Science Fiction Fantasy Blog

Vanity Fair interview with author Samantha Shannon

In anticipation of our discussion of The Bone Season, I thought I'd post this interview with the author from Vanity Fair.   It's from 2013, and does mention the book rights that she sold to 21 countries, as well as the fact that she sold the film rights ... all at the ripe age of 21.     Here's a bit from the Q&A  --- but click on the link to read the whole thing

VF Daily: Was sci-fi always the genre you wanted to write in?

Samantha Shannon: Yeah—I think it gives you a lot of opportunities and fantasy. It is a genre where you can break walls. You have to have a believable, coherent system, but it kind of gives you a lot more possibilities than just a normal contemporary story.

How did you seek inspiration for the whimsical vocabulary of your futuristic world?

The main inspiration was A Clockwork Orange. That whole book is written in a very dense slang. I knew I was—I am—not enough of a linguist that I could sustain that through an entire novel, but it did give the novel a really interesting linguistic color and I wanted to bring that in on a slightly lesser level into my book. So I looked up, like, Victorian underworld slang, and I kind of made up a bit of my own. I wanted the characters to have distinct voices in this kind of strange, 19th-century/futuristic world they are living in.

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Thanks, Jen!

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