Locus spotlights Ellen Kushner and Tremontaine

Locus interviews Ellen Kushner for their January 2017 issue of the magazine:

You’re the creator of the Riverside series, which includes novels and stories written by you, in collaboration, and by other hands, most recently the Tremontaine serials. Tell us a little about the history of the Riverside series.When my first novel, Swordspoint, came out in the US in 1987, it was a weird outlier: a fantasy without magic! Set in a city, not a Tolkienian landscape! With queer characters in a largely bisexual society…! I didn’t do it on purpose. Or rather, I did – I just wrote what I wanted, and figured it would be a disaster.

Well, at the time, the book found its little audience. And it seems also to have been a stake stuck in the ground of the late ’80s, saying: ‘‘Hey, it’s OK to depart from tradition!’’ Since then, books of that kind in the genre have tended to be called either Fantasy of Manners or Historical Fantasy.

Swordspoint wasn’t the first to do any of the things I listed, but it was the noisiest, I guess. Anyway, people asked me when I would do the sequel, but I had a horror of repeating myself. So my next book was the rural, romantic, folkloric and musical Thomas the Rhymer (which won the World Fantasy and the Mythopoeic Awards).

Continue reading the interview with this online reprint at Locus Magazine’s website.