Premee Mohamed on "Wickhills," Writing, and Fantasy Worlds
Premee Mohamed is a Nebula, World Fantasy, Ignyte, Locus, and Aurora award-winning Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta. She has also been a finalist for the Hugo, British Fantasy, British Science Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Crawford awards. In 2024, she was the Edmonton Public Library writer-in-residence, and she has taught at establishments including the Banff Institute for the Arts, the Clarion Workshop, and the Carl Brandon Society. She has judged short fiction contests for CBC and Alberta Views Magazine. (Photo Credit: Lensman Studios - Michael Meniane)
INTERVIEW
MG: The city of Wickhills is a character in its own right—one that sprouts new train lines overnight and closes alleyways. How did you design the logic behind a living, changing city, and what challenges did you face in keeping track of its shifting geography?
PM: Well (spoiler alert?) the nice thing about Wickhills the city is that the geography shifts all the time, so I didn’t actually need to keep track of anything! I mean jokes aside, streets, walls, gates, and entire neighbourhoods appear, vanish, change, get crowded with new infrastructure, etc., while train lines are definitely not under the control of the Transportation department – narratively, I needed residents to be used to that so that an outsider was able to come in and point out how weird it is. The logic actually stemmed from the premise of the book itself, which was (more spoilers); the surviving six cities needed to be fundamentally the same (the same species, sort of?) but exhibiting different phenotypes, like varieties of fancy pigeon. And the strangeness, the motion, the shifting/consuming, varies city by city depending on their particular culture and location; it’s certainly more obtrusive in some than others. I guess as with everything in a novel I was just asking myself “How does this get up my characters’ noses?” and “What problems can it cause?” And for Wickhills certainly, how can the physical setup of the city contribute to the government-encouraged sense of paranoia, surveillance, and repression?
MG: Wickhills is a high-stakes spy thriller set in a Gaslamp fantasy world. It authentically captures the shadowy world of espionage. How did you prepare for that aspect of the novel?
PM: If anything I think that’s where the book came from! After John le Carre’s death I started reading his books in publication order and was very much enjoying them – particularly his skill at building small, ferocious, deeply uncomfortable scenes between people who actually shared the same goals but disagreed on methods. (I realize this seems like a weird way to put it, but it is something I picked up immediately and really admired. It’s easy to write conflict between people who have differing agendas; it takes a much defter touch to do it the other way.) I also ended up doing (of course) a ton of research, not just on espionage but also secret police everywhere (particularly the Gestapo and the Cheka), and really digging into the organization of the sort of ‘East vs. West’ intelligence organizations during the Cold War and how they decided to run their operations. I also did a lot of reading (as I think might possibly show in one specific chapter) about the Manhattan project, the Russian response to the smuggled scientific intelligence, and that sort of… large-scale, impossible-to-preserve secrecy. But aside from the practical, everyday sort of spycraft stuff I think the novel owes its biggest debt to a book I read maybe seven or eight years ago: J.M. Berger’s Extremism, from the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series. It’s not a long book but I have never been able to shake it; I think aspects of it must be appearing in everything I’ve written since that first reading.
MG: Critics have drawn comparisons between Wickhills and iconic weird-city settings like China Miéville’s New Crobuzon or Terry Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork. How did your background as a scientist influence the urban ecology of Wickhills?
PM: That was really fun actually! Mainly it was in the research process of really digging into (ha ha??) how cities become cities, and why the world is littered with ruins that archaeologists dig up later. That is, how does a smaller settlement become something vast, or at what point do people decide to leave and when does it happen en masse? So I was reading about ancient cities (Knossos, Çatalhöyük, Harappa, etc) and what they looked like when they were dug up; and then at what was underneath modern cities, like the Paris catacombs and London sewers. Physically also I was like “Well how is everybody still alive,” but it’s made clear early on that the city is moving the walls out to keep a good amount of farmland, and they have free access to the river and the sea; there’s a running joke with fantasy writers that if you don’t address wastewater management now, you’re getting lazy, but even if we’re not thinking “What do they do with their poop” while we read, it’s a real concern for a made-up city!
MG: What can you tell us about the dark socioeconomic reality that lies under the whimsical city of Wickhills. Is it meant as an allegorical representation of a specific real-world issue?
PM: I mean, isn’t all fantasy? Not to be flip, of course. We’re writing speculative fiction because, as Ursula K. Le Guin says, “Such myths, symbols, images, do not disappear under the scrutiny of the intellect.” We’re exploring a world next to ours rather than our own because we want to look at the other; and we want to say to the reader “Look how different they are from you!” Hopefully at some point the reader clues in that there is really no other; there are only ever different kinds of you. Fantasy and science fiction just let us present our characters – who are our readers -- unusual what-if scenarios that aren’t limited by the boundaries of realism. So yes, I wanted to talk about the Gestapo and informing on your neighbours, and the Cheka and those middle-of-the-night knocks. I wanted to talk about ICE and deciding who belongs where and who doesn’t belong, and what it means to vote people into power who divide people into ‘legal’ and ‘illegal,’ which is not even the first step into the steep slope that ends in dividing people into ‘human’ and ‘not-human.’ I wanted to talk about privacy versus freedom, autonomy versus public safety, freedom-from and freedom-to, real memory versus the ‘official’ account, and (finally) what it means to change and change and change and change and discover that the world around you hasn’t changed, and you have to leave it.
MG: SFF giants like Adrian Tchaikovsky, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, and Elizabeth Bear have praised the book's lush prose and imaginative depth. Were there specific books or authors that inspired Wickhills?
PM: As I mentioned, definitely John Le Carre! Also Mervyn Peake’s weirdo megastructure fantasy of manners, the Gormenghast trilogy. Of course every ‘big-city fantasy’ also owes a debt, I think, these days, to Terry Pratchett’s Ankh-Morpork from his Discworld books. And Umberto Eco generally – too many books to list but starting with The Name of the Rose, for the eternal question of “What would you do to get your hands on forbidden knowledge?” (Again, hopefully the answer is not “Kill a guy” or “Kill several guys.”) John Crowley generally too, because he writes settings that are such a peculiar combination of sprawlingly yet cleverly described, especially Little, Big, which is also a story about discovering the truth about the world you live in. And CJ Cherryh, especially her mini-collection Sunfall, which I’ve always loved – and in fact as I was in edits I was like “Wait a minute, did I decide on six cities because there are six in Sunfall??” (So she’s more literary DNA than influence, because again, everything I write calls back to that book somehow, I think.)
MG: Vycol Ferec is a streetwise, pragmatic agent who deliberately avoids big-picture moral questions and cares mostly about getting paid. What made him the ideal lens through which readers experience Wickhills, and how does his internal moral reckoning reflect the larger themes of the book?
PM: A lot of stuff shifted and moved around from my earliest drafts to the final version, but Ferec was always the same (thank goodness, I can hear my editor thinking) – I think because he’s both very much in the thick of things (he’s a native Wickhiller, he’s steeped in the culture, he’s never experienced anything else, this is all normal to him) and he’s got an emotional distance to everything he does (because he is lightly but definitively messed up, as a person). I did have fun writing him, but he was also stressful – he’s the city in microcosm, he has the same affections and worries, he wants things to stay the same, and he’s really taken his mentor Bardanes’ philosophy to heart, which is to say that if you subscribe to very black-and-white thinking then the only ethical question that exists is “Do you work to increase chaos, or increase order? You can only pick one.” And he’s so confident he’s on the right side. Narratively, he’s often out of step with what the reader is seeing, because he’s still doing the work to convince himself that whatever he’s doing is justified (if not moral) and everything will come out in the wash. So he often ends up doing ‘the right thing’ for the wrong reasons, and vice-versa, and not really reckoning with it right until the end, when he realizes the biggest, most important thing about both the city and himself at the same time.
MG: A central tension in Wickhills revolves around the morality of intelligence agencies: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? ("Who watches the watchers?"). What questions did you want to raise about institutional trust, state power, and personal responsibility through Ferec’s agency, Seaborne?
PM: Definitely the first and easiest is “Can you really get used to anything,” and of course you can. Especially if you’re being nudged, primed, and prompted 24/7 from the institutions and states that have a vested interest in really kind of shocking things – like surveillance and human rights violations – becoming wallpaper in a short period of time. I’m not suggesting that current governments that prioritize stability and safety are bad, obviously; but again, in fiction, we can explore a wider spectrum of incremental state actions that have built up into something genuinely repressive and dystopian. No real place is doing everything; but nobody’s doing nothing, either. Safety is a good goal! But historically we’ve seen how that goes. Seaborne isn’t doing anything that a thousand other states and cities haven’t done – infiltrating unions and guilds, targeted assassinations of dissidents (and pre-dissidents!), dissemination of propaganda and upholding the police state, deciding for themselves what counts as sedition or terrorism. So many lines have been crossed in so many places and so many times. I wanted to bring the story down to the human level and say: Realistically, what are the lines that one man perceives and will he cross them?
MG: Reviewers and readers alike have noted that while Wickhills delivers a satisfying conclusion, the door remains wide open for future stories in this world. Do you plan to return to Ferec and the city of Wickhills in a sequel or companion novel?
PM: I would love to, really; there isn’t another book contracted at the moment, but next year if I have time I think it would be fun to at least write some short stories in the world. There are stories people started telling but didn’t finish (the nun?), childhood anecdotes to dig into (not the traumatizing ones, perhaps), jobs and operations that were casually mentioned but not described (what do you mean you got the down payment for your house by working with a demon?).
MG: What got you into writing?
PM: I’ve just always loved language and words, I guess – I can’t remember when I did start writing my own stories, but it was pretty early on, probably around the time I learned how to read. I would noodle away on (terrible) novels for years sometimes, just opening them up and being like “Aha, I think I shall make my characters do this” and writing for a bit and then closing the notebook or the file again. (They all got unbelievably long but very few of them actually got done.) The more I read the more expansive my own work got, because I was usually not interested in other people’s settings or characters but I would sometimes become really fixated on style and then start working that, experimentally, into my own stuff. (So is there some cyberpunk stuff written in actually incomprehensible Southern American prose because I got into William Gibson and William Faulkner at the same time? Yes, and it’s on a 3 ½ inch disk somewhere at my parents’ house, probably.) What obsessed me was the voice of the story, not so much what people were doing in it; so I wrote for quite literally decades for myself, as my favourite hobby, until a friend of mine eventually was like “You write?” and then “You should submit a short story to this anthology call.” It was all downhill from there.
MG: What can you tell us about your writing process?
PM: Mostly that it evolves, which is fine! I’m certainly not the same writer I was a year ago, or five years ago, or twenty years ago. (I mean, part of that is deadlines, yes.) At the moment a lot of my process depends on the earliest stage of the idea – like, “Does this idea have legs” and “How long are the legs,” so I can kind of plan how I’m going to come at it. When I’m coming up with the outline or framework I’ll often start at the end and work backwards, but not always; for short stories sometimes I’ll just scribble three or four bullet points in my notebook and go from there. (I am a big notebook guy and go through 4-6 notebooks a year depending on page count.) I can say I am definitely much more of an outliner than I used to be, which is mostly a product of getting into the publishing pipeline; I did have to teach myself, with a lot of trial and error, several ways to outline that kind of ‘trick’ my brain into doing something it does not want to do and does not do naturally. Since drafting is my favourite part, I now try to do pretty clean outlines for novels at least, so that I can jump into the writing part and not spend quite so much time in the revising part.
MG: What is the best writing advice you have ever received?
PM: I think because I’m entirely self-taught, I haven’t actually gotten a ton of writing advice that I hadn’t already figured out on my own; but I have always loved Umberto Eco’s note at the end of The Name of the Rose, where he notes that not only his editor but his friends wanted him to tone down his first hundred pages so as to ‘ease’ readers into the book a little better, and he was like, “Nope.” Fundamentally, he goes on, it’s not meant as a test – like, “If you survive these first hundred pages then you pass, and you can read the rest of the book” – but ‘constructing a reader’ who will enjoy the rest. I’ve always taken that completely to heart. I’m not modifying my writing for anyone – not an editor, not a prospective reader, nobody. It stays as it is, and there will be readers it will connect with out there somewhere, or not. None of my business either way.
MG: Who are your favourite writers and why?
PM: These days I find myself pulled between old favourites and new favourites – mostly people who are doing what I like to do, i.e. messing with structure, format, voice, and style as much as subject. Vajra Chandrasekera’s novels and short fiction are great, I’ll read anything by Claire North and Nick Harkaway, I still love CJ Cherryh, Gene Wolfe, Umberto Eco, and William S. Burroughs, obviously Ursula K. Le Guin, John Crowley, and a ton of nonfiction.
MG: Do you think people will still be reading novels in 2050? Why or why not?
PM: I mean the entire history of the novel is people asking “When will this craze for novels fade?” “Why are people still reading novels?” “Don’t they have anything better to do?” “It’s corrupting the women!” “It’s corrupting the children!” etc., and there are still novels, so yes, I think in 23 years people will certainly still be reading novels. I also confidently predict that many people will be annoyed by this, many will boast about having their robot companion summarize novels for them (“I read Moby-Dick last night and it took me eight seconds”), many will also brag that they only read nonfiction to improve their minds, and all the while, the novel-readers will ignore them and continue enjoying books the same way we always have.
PURCHASE: WICKHILLS
