Holly Phillips' The Engine's Child: A Good Dark Fantasy Read for the Holidays

Holly Phillips burst onto the science fiction/fantasy scene with perfectly realized, emotionally complex short fiction. Now she has a new novel out from Del Rey, The Engine's Child. Library Journal said of the novel, "This richly complex tale...deftly encapsulates an entire culture's frictions and fractures in the loyalties of one young woman. Moth seeks to climb out of the Tidal slums where she'd been abandoned without betraying her Tidal friends, her secret mother, her lover, or her bond with the invisible powers of her world. Beneath the surface of a seemingly stable, if compressed, island civilization, connections and tensions link the Society of Doors, an outlaw organization looking to return to the heaven of the past; Lady Vashmarna's scientific idealists seeking to expand limited resources; a ruler clinging to the failing status quo, and the Tidal have-nots coping with an explosive brew of fear, faith, and rumor. Sharp-edged personalities and complicated personal relationship among the characters prevent Phillips's tale from degenerating into allegory. Her lush prose and dark fantasy cityscape will appeal to fans of China Mieville's Perdido Street Station and Sarah Monette's Melusine, but her manipulative, scarred, sexual, unapologetic antiheroine recalls Elizabeth Bear or Melissa Scott."

I've had the pleasure of meeting Phillips, who is thoughtful and witty, and whose writing style is lush in the best possible way. I interviewed her recently about The Engine's Child, her first book from a major publisher.

      

Amazon.com: This is your first novel, after a critically acclaimed short story collection. Do you have a preferred form? What challenges did you face in writing the novel?
Holly Phillips: Heh. It's actually my second novel, but I'm not surprised by the error. The Burning Girl (Prime Books, 2006) vanished pretty much without a trace, the sole exception being the cloud-chamber neutrino-blip of the British Fantasy Award (very) Long List. I can't complain, though, as BG was a very first-novelish sort of first (published) novel. I'm much happier with The Engine's Child, not least because I feel that this is the first novel I've written that really comes to grip with the long form. And it is my first big-market novel, published by Del Rey.

I do still write short fiction, though not as much as during the short story explosion that resulted in In The Palace of Repose. I think that if I were forced to choose between them, I would go with the long form; there's just so much more freedom to dig deep into characters and ideas. But I love short stories. They provide instant gratification, in the sense of one cookie now rather than a 500-page manuscript several months down the road, and they also give me a place to play, prime the pump of my imagination, try out new techniques, polish my craft... Maybe it's more like a bag of cookies now.

But it is hard to switch between the long and the short forms. Not that I've ever been good at writing short short stories, mind you. But I think the rough drafts of my novels tend to suffer from density and a lack of clarity, because I'm always trying to cram in all the detail and nuance I can into a small space--which might make for a richer short story, but it can get a little wearisome over the course of a novel. So my rewrites are usually about paring down and opening up, cutting away some of the underbrush and letting in the light.

Amazon.com: What was the most fun you had in writing the novel?
Holly Phillips: Definitely my main character, Moth. I went into the novel wanting more than anything to write an active character--someone who doesn't just respond to events, but sets them in motion -- so Moth is feisty, scheming, manipulative, reckless, and prone to wounded surprise when things blow up in her face. She's also been described as an "antiheroine," which to me points out the interesting convention in traditional fantasy, that it's the villain, not the hero, who usually gets to overturn the status quo. Moth is all about change--but I think she's one of the good guys, nevertheless. And boy, was she ever a joy to write.

Amazon.com: Could you describe your writing process--when, where, with what?
Holly Phillips: It seems to change with every project, but I always start with a lot of noodling in my notebooks. Some ideas suffer a slow evolution over the course of months, even years, but I think The Engine's Child was one of the faster ones. I spun out some basic ideas, sat down and wrote a hundred pages, decided it was all wrong and went back to the notebook in an effort to lose the cliches, and then finally blasted through the rough draft in about 10 weeks. So I mess around with pen and paper at the ideas stage, compose a rough draft on the computer (mostly my MacBook these days), print out and scribble copiously, revise on the computer...

I use a lot of paper because I find working with the physical manuscript--scribbling stuff out, doing boxes and arrows, writing in the margins--helps me keep track of what I'm doing over the course of the whole thing. I also write the odd scene in my notebook, usually when I'm working out one of the hard bits. And I mostly work in the morning to early afternoon. When I'm fully engaged with a novel project I might write 20 hours a week--say, 5 days/week at 4 hours/day--but I'm not a 2,000 words every day kind of writer. I have high output periods and fallow periods when I'm reading a lot and noodling various ideas.

Amazon.com: What most surprised you about reactions to the short story collection?
Holly Phillips: That it got any at all. Seriously, this was a collection of mostly original (i.e. frequently rejected) stories from a no-name writer. The peak of my ambition was to get a decent review in Publisher's Weekly, something I could build on for future novel submissions. I got that review and was happy, and then out of nowhere came all this attention, reviews and buzz and even award nominations. Whoa. Took me completely by surprise.

Amazon.com: Has your own perception of your work changed after having encountered reader reactions to it?
Holly Phillips: After the initial excitement (and I mean I was excited by just realizing that actual strangers, not related to me, were reading my work) it really messed with my head. I've always struggled in a very uncomfortable double-think mental space, where I've thought I'm (a) brilliant and (b) lousy pretty much simultaneously. So all the accolades--maybe especially because they were about stories that I was so over, downright sick of, by the time they were in print--drove me into this terrible place of second-guessing every writing decision I made. Basically, I had this idea that if people thought these stories were so great, and I knew that these stories were just my apprentice work, then everything I wrote from then on had to be absolutely brilliant.

In the long run (and I mean in 5 years) I might reap some benefit from that, since it made me think long and hard about what good writing means, about the effects I want to achieve and the techniques I need to develop to achieve them--but right now I'm still struggling to overcome this dreadful self-consciousness when I sit down to write something new. I call it the curse of ambition, because darn it, I really do want to be a good writer some day.

Amazon.com: Can you tell us something about the novel that might not be obvious from reading it?
Holly Phillips: Okay, I had to laugh. The maybe not obvious thing was that I thought I was writing a fairly traditional, conventional fantasy novel. In fact, I was really happy at the thought that *finally* I'd written something easy to categorize. Oh, sure, I tried to be literary in my approach, but I thought, you know, beautiful language and depth of characterization would be the icing on the cake. But then my agent started to get rejection comments like "too literary for our fantasy list and too fantasy for our literary list" and "gorgeous book, too unusual, don't see a place for it in our list," and I realized I had, once again, missed the mark. To be honest, I'm still not sure why The Engine's Child's not the fantasy novel next door--but then, I've always loved Gormenghast way, way more than Lord of the Rings, so what do I know?

Amazon.com: What are you currently working on?
Holly Phillips: I am working on a Canadian literary novel... Hmm. I'm working on a contemporary fantasy novel...uh...supernatural suspense novel... Anyway, it's called Magpie Keep and I don't know what it is yet. It's about twin brothers who grew up reading books and playing games of make-believe until the Big Trauma happened, and one brother went (apparently) crazy. Now they're all grown up and the sane twin has come home to the family farm in rural British Columbia, supposedly to take care of his brother while their caretaking mother is away in France. But he finds that his brother isn't conforming to his expectations of craziness, and then things start to get weird, and, you know, stuff happens.

So there are magpies, and a tuxedo cat named Steve, and I think it's going to be a terrific book, but I always do when I'm at the beginning of something. I can say that it surprised me a bit, how extremely happy I was to come back to the real-world slipstream end of things. Plus, a lot of it is about books and reading, imagination and creativity, which are subjects very dear to me for obvious reasons. And for the first time ever I'm setting my fiction in my native ground of the mountainous interior of British Columbia, so I'm loving playing this game of make-believe in a real place--especially since it's a place I miss, now that I've moved away. A homecoming, and a book about coming home.