Called "violent, poetic and compulsively readable" by Maclean’s, science fiction author Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times bestselling writer and World Fantasy Award winner. He is biracial and was born in the Caribbean, grew up in Grenada, and spent time in the British and US Virgin Islands. His Xenowealth series begins with Crystal Rain. Along with other standalone novels and his almost one hundred stories, Buckell's works have been translated into twenty different languages. He has been nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards and the Astounding Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. Buckell currently lives in Bluffton, Ohio, with his wife and two daughters, where he teaches Creative Writing at Bluffton University and is also an instructor at the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing program. His latest novel is A Stranger in the Citadel and he recently talked about it with Daryl Maxwell for the LAPL Blog.
What was your inspiration for A Stranger in the Citadel?
It's often hard to understand how long ideas take to simmer in the background before appearing formed to me as a writer, but for years, I'd had the first line of the novel ("You shall not suffer a librarian to live") clanging around in the back of my head after I wrote it in a creativity exercise for a workshop I lead (the prompt being to take a well-known phrase and tweak it in a variety of ways until something curious came out of it). It had all these interesting resonances about how our society was treating librarians (and then after I wrote the book, those resonances really started ringing as book bans took off), the pursuit of knowledge and science, and it felt like it was in a conversation with one of my all-time favorite novels: Fahrenheit 451.
Are Lilith, Ishmael, Kira, or any of the other characters in the novel inspired by or based on specific individuals?
I don't think I create characters with any bearing on individuals. Certain behaviors or reactions, situations, maybe, but it's more that all the encounters with real and fictional people in all my years add up to influence how I interpret humanity, but I don't base characters of individuals in my life or that I read about.
Some future scholars may see it differently if I'm lucky enough to have any impact on the written world. But my own self-mythology is that I get a lot of satisfaction in making these people up.
How did the novel evolve and change as you wrote and revised it? Are there any characters or scenes that were lost in the process that you wish had made it to the published version?
I carried this book around in my head for almost six years. Writing it was an almost purgative act, I needed to stop thinking about it. Because of that time to marinate, by the time I came to write it, I already had this friendship with the book, the characters, and the world. I only had to excavate what was there and give it the light of day. Sounds mysterious, but it wasn't like a muse dropped it on me. It's more that I let my subconscious work on the outline and characterization for so long that when I finally sat down to write it, it was just waiting to be discovered.
In your afterword, you mention how the ending of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 has haunted you. Is Fahrenheit 451 your favorite Bradbury work? If so, can you tell us why? If not, what is it and why?
The Martian Chronicles is my favorite Bradbury book, a collection of stories about a version of Mars that didn't even exist when he wrote them. It makes them oddly counter-factual alternate future science fiction stories. It would be like me writing stories about a swampy Venus today (I confess, I actually did that for an anthology edited by George RR Martin and Gardner Dozois and was delighted to do so because I loved Chronicles so much). The stories in there rock me to this day.
But Fahrenheit 451 is a book that sticks with you. I remember in high school just thinking about a future with no books. It left me with such a feeling of grief and loss, that book, and I remember thinking how impossible it seemed that people would turn away from knowledge and books. Yet here we are in 2023 with Americans actually burning books and banning happening on a scale that is breathtaking. And it's not just books in schools and children's sections of libraries; but the bans are now targeting regular bookstores and adult stacks. I've been a writer since the late 90s, and it feels like I'm reading about the 1950s or, worse, Germany in the 1930s. You used the word 'haunted,' and that's how I feel.
A Stranger in the Citadel has a few surprising reveals/plot twists. Do you have a favorite reveal/plot twist from another novel? Some other media?
Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time also has one of my favorite plot swerves at the end of the book that put that book on my top ten. I can't spoil it, it's so good. It's one of my favorite "giveaway" books in fiction these days. I've gifted at least ten copies of it, and I love getting that text from a reader when they hit the end that's like "Oh, you said the end was satisfying and surprising: you weren't kidding."
A Stranger in the Citadel would make a marvelous film or series. If you were able to cast the production of A Stranger in the Citadel, who would your dream cast be?
The chances of that are so small it almost feels cruel to try and cast it. It's such an odd little book I doubt this, but I would be rather pleased with life if Idris Elba played Ishmael, the librarian wandering the desert with some books on his back, hunted by the archangel for the crime of literacy.
What's currently on your nightstand?
Shigida and the Brass Head of Obalufon by Wole Talibi, Children of Memory (the third book to the Children of Time series) by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Ursula K. Le Guin' s The Left Hand of Darkness (I'm teaching it in class in a couple weeks, rereading it before we start discussing it in class).
What is the last piece of art (music, movies, tv, more traditional art forms) that you've experienced or that has impacted you?
This'll sound pretentious, but there's this French composer named Erik Satie (1866-1925) who wrote a piece called Gnossienne No. 1 for piano. I heard a version of it on a powerful moment of a TV show and ruined the moment by holding up my phone and shouting, "Hey Siri, what's that music?" because it had such an effect on me, I had to know what it was. I have listened to some amazing pianists play the other Gnossienne pieces as well, and there's something so mournful and moving that I am simply transported and moved every time I hear Gnossienne No. 1. It gives me chills. Every single time.
What is the question that you're always hoping you'll be asked, but never have been? What is your answer?
"Would you like a job that lets you talk about science fiction books, movies, and writing fiction every day, that also has health insurance?" and I would answer: "Yes, that sounds amazing." I'm sorry to sound so commercially crass, but I keep being told I need to put my hopes and intentions out into the universe so it will answer me. I don't believe in that stuff, but in terms of questions, I'm secretly hoping people will ask me, honestly, this is the only one that sits just under the surface of my waking brain, rattling about and screaming at me.
What are you working on now?
Like many, I'm suffering from Long Covid. I found myself battling severe brain fog last year, and in twelve months, the most I wrote was a single story. I found myself lying awake in the small hours of the quiet, lonely night, wondering whether I'd ever be able to call myself a writer again. It felt like that thing, the creative spark, the thing I lived and loved to do, had been snuffed by exhaustion and inability to focus. But I started some new medicine to help with my already-existing ADHD, and it helped with the brain fog as well.
Let me be real: I could still do with a cure for Long Covid, though. With tens of millions of us affected, why there isn't some Apollo-level program to look into this is beyond me. But I guess it's easier to pretend nothing happened because then no one has to do anything. And those of us battling this are just the price for walking around pretending nothing happened or is happening so no one has to take any responsibility for how badly handling Covid was botched.
Anyway, I'm about a quarter of my way into a new novel for the first time since getting Covid. It's slow going, I have to use a thesaurus for the first time in my life, which is a blow to my identity of being such a huge reader that I have a thesaurus in my head. But I'm working around the aphasia, I'm working around the slower pace I write now, and I'm having a ton of fun with The Maroon. It's a story about a soldier from an advanced civilization banished to a planet that has fallen on hard times and turned toward despotism. It's been nice to be back in the saddle after a year. I no longer lay awake at night, wondering if I'm still a writer.
I am. And I'm still here. And I'm grateful for that.
