INTERVIEW with my favourite author of 2018… Emily Suvada

An Interview with Emily Suvada

Hi Emily, Thank you so much for being part of my blog. 🙂

It’s my pleasure! Thanks for having me on to talk about my books!

When you first wanted to be a writer, what led you to write a Science-Fiction series?

I’ve always loved science fiction. Ever since I was a kid, I loved stories and shows about aliens, time travel, cyborgs, and space. I grew up watching Star Trek and I think that really influenced my tastes – many of my favorite characters were aliens or had altered their bodies with technology. You can definitely see the influence of a species like the Borg in my writing in This Mortal Coil. I also studied science, and that background means I spend a lot of time thinking about and reading about science, which lends itself to having book ideas set in future worlds where areas of current scientific exploration, like genetic engineering, have become commonplace. I’ve had a lot of book ideas over the years, and almost all of them are science fiction in nature.

Do you have any favourite novels of this genre?

I absolutely love Michael Crichton’s science fiction novels – he wrote in a way that made science so accessible and thrilling, and managed to build his plots seamlessly around science elements in a way few writers manage. In the young adult space, I absolutely love the Illuminae series by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff – it’s tight, thrilling scifi set in a gritty, believable world and the series totally hooked me.

What is your inspiration behind This Mortal Coil? 

The original inspiration was just the idea of Cat – this young, smart girl who’s gone completely feral in a post-apocalyptic world, and is fighting to survive. I then asked myself what happened to the world, decided it had to be a virus, and that virus had to be particularly… explosive, and then I thought about how this girl could be connected to a cure that would mean an end to the outbreak. Everything spun slowly from there – the genetics, the story, the characters and the world. But that first scene of Cat beside a lake, dirty and blood-stained in filthy clothes and half-starved – that never changed.

I would love to to be in your brain, how did you create such a mesmerising world in This Mortal Coil?

Well, my head is a pretty dangerous place to be sometimes – just ask my characters 😀 I think the thing that made the world so deep was the fact that I’d written and explored it so much. I wrote a LOT of drafts of This Mortal Coil over several years, and every time I’d write a draft I’d deepen the world and its tech. Eventually, that meant the final manuscript felt real and gritty and lived-in, because I’d literally been living in it for years, ha!

How do you combine science and technology so seamlessly without it getting so confusing? 

I personally succeeded in science by finding ways to understand it on a straightforward, simple level – and that helps me communicate it in that way in my writing. I’m not someone who can memorize tons of formulas and how to apply them, which means that I relied on building up a strong instinctive understanding of science and its first principles. If I couldn’t remember a formula, at least I’d know how to derive it because I’d really try to understand why and how it worked. That same instinctive, deep understanding is what I try to use when I’m writing about the science in my books. Science really isn’t hard – all of it can be instinctive and simple, and even obvious when it’s presented in a straightforward way to someone who’s interested in hearing it. That’s what I tried to do with the science in my books. And maybe that’s the key – making the reader WANT to understand it because they’re invested in this world and plot and want to know how it works.

If no When This Mortal Coil becomes a film or series (it has too) who would like to star your own characters?

I like your optimism! I’ve never tried to cast my own characters because I think film and TV are very different mediums to writing, and I’m open to my characters changing if they ever hit the screen. I also have very clear personalities for the characters in my mind that I don’t think any actor could totally represent – but they’d absolutely be able to represent THEIR interpretation of the characters if it were ever adapted, and that’s what’s important.

If you were living in that world which I’m sure you most of the time when writing, 😉 what coding would you like to have on your panel? What would you look like? Scaled skin? 

I think I’d start out with pretty tame apps – aesthetic stuff, metabolic stuff, all the sensory hijacks and the inbuilt VR tech obviously, but I know eventually I’d just get weirder and weirder until I was like, trying to communicate electromagnetically with birds or something. I’d start going Konmari with my body parts, for sure. Who needs two kidneys? Can’t that space be used for something better? Why not upgrade my lungs, shrink them down, and try to fit in a lobe for echolocation? I’d get really weird really, really quickly.

Can you tell us in 5 words what’s to come in the finale? 

Oooo good question! Okay, let’s have a go: Power struggles, and pushing limits.

Add this to your Goodreads shelf now if you haven’t read it. It’s a series not to be missed and the best Sci-Fi series I’ve ever read.