Interviewing Marian Womack

Hellooooo!! I recently reviewed The Swimmers by Marian Womack a fascinating science fiction tale exploring climate change, colonialism and learning to understand your own world. I also loved Marian’s The Golden Key reviewed last year, which is a very different gothic fantasy tale. I was very lucky recently to talk to the author about the new book and other projects.

Thank you so much for such an entrancing tale!

I’m so glad you liked it.

How would you usually booktempt someone into reading The Swimmers?

There are lots of ways to bring people into the book’s orbit. You need to judge what will interest them and then sell it to them: do they want a Gothic novel, a post-apocalyptic story, a coming-of-age tale, an eco-fable? I think there are lots of ways to get into The Swimmers: I hope that they all lead to the same place, more or less.

After The Golden Key you’ve moved into the far future. What led to this story?

I always have lots of projects on the go at once: The Golden Key is the first book in a detective series, which interprets the present by looking at bits of the past. By contrast, The Swimmers is a book that looks into the future, insofar as we can see what the future might be, and talks about lots of the issues that really worry me, terrify me, about what might happen to humanity as a whole in the not-too-distant future.

In your future there the use of almost familiar cultures and traditions such as those practised by the Shuvani we meet and the background of Andalusia. What pulled you towards those choices?

I’m trying to extrapolate a little. I don’t think that humans will forget the past completely, at least not in the comprehensible future. In some ways the future I imagine for the characters in this novel is a bit like that described in Anna Washburn’s brilliant play Mr Burns, where they are grasping at a past they never truly inhabited. As for why I chose the particular places and traditions I did, Andalusia is obviously vital to how my mind is formed; I was born there, and grew up there, and even though I have remade myself in some ways as an English writer, I feel very much that Andalusia is the dark background to my current life, my current mind. 

You work hard to make understand both Pearl and Arlo’s worldviews but never drown us in long explanations – do you like creating tales where the reader has to pull the story together rather than the more traditional big exposition scenes?

I think so, yes. I was lucky enough to get a place on the Clarion science fiction workshop in San Diego back in 2014, and one of the things that was drummed into our heads there was a horror of the ‘As you know, Bob’ style of writing—exposition, exposition, exposition—so maybe it’s a bit of a reaction against that, an inspired fear of the obvious. But I think a lot of books that we read even now, even the so-called classics of realism, put us in a position similar to that, having to pull strands together to discover the implicit background. I mean, if you read War and Peace nowadays, there’s a lot of background, a lot of unexamined cultural information that was obvious to Tolstoy and is not obvious to us, that a contemporary reader has to imagine, or recreate.

What else can we look forward to you in the future and where can we find out more?

I am currently deep into a new novel that I feel a bit scared about talking about in public. Alongside that, I am working on the sequel to The Golden Key and a collection of short stories. The best place to find out about these things is, I suppose, to follow me on social media (@beekeepermadrid). When I get important information (e.g. the publication date, or cover of a new novel), then I suppose I’ll hire a skywriting team and a dance troupe to spread the word.

If there was one book (not your own) that you wish you could get everyone to read what would it be?

The trouble with questions like this is that you think you’re selling something incontrovertible, and then you realise that everyone reads things differently. I mean, I would love everyone to read the works of the Spanish novelist Carmen Martín Gaite, but I am aware that being force-fed dense, intelligent, shattered female post-war fiction might create me more enemies than it does friends. But read her, especially Variable Cloud: she’s astonishingly good.