Interviewing Oliver K Langmead
Hellloooo!!!!
I recently reviewed the excellent Calypso by Oliver K Langmead this books tells the story of an expedition to bring life to a new planet and the strange characters we meet in the spaceship above it. But it’s written in verse and that makes it an insanely immersive reading experience I absolutely loved. It was a pleasure to invite Oliver back to the blog to discuss how this book came about and more.
How do you like to booktempt people into reading Calypso?
Calypso is perfect if you’re looking for something a bit different to read. It’s a space opera written in verse, about terraforming and transformation. It has four point-of-view characters, each written in their own verseform, and it includes some gorgeous illustrations from Darren Kerrigan. Not only that – but the book is a beautiful artefact! Titan have done an incredible job putting it together, and it looks fantastic on a shelf. Some brilliant people have been saying some nice things about it, too – from Sarah Waters, to Tade Thompson – and I’ve been blown away by the response so far.
Poetry and Science Fiction is an area you’ve explored before – what is the attraction of this combination? What did you want to do differently with Calypso?
Speculative fiction and poetry aren’t perhaps as divorced from each other as you might imagine. The classics – those epic poems we all know; the Odyssey, the Iliad, the Inferno, Paradise Lost etc, come from a place of myth, and faith, and identity. These were ways for people to explore and celebrate their beliefs and cultures through storytelling. Looking back at them today, however, and we can read them as speculative texts. They should be respected as the cultural artefacts they are, absolutely – but we can also enjoy them as splendid flights of fantasy.
My first verse-novel, Dark Star, was my attempt at taking that ancient form – the epic poem – and trying something new with it. I wrote it in metre, but in a way that would make it accessible to a modern reader (most epics are deliberately archaic, even for the times they were written – in large part due to their metre), ending up with something like a page-turner poem. Calypso was an exercise in taking everything I learned from Dark Star and pushing it much, much further; using verse-forms to explore things like post-human identities, while still maintaining the feeling that the reader is reading a novel. It’s a lot more experimental, but in ways that are designed to still be accessible.
Each of the key characters in Calypso have a distinct set of phrasing, perspectives and formats. How did they evolve?
Yes – four very different points of view, and four very different ways of writing! Here’s a peek under the hood:
- Rochelle, our principal character and colonial ethicist, is written in stanzas of four lines, each line composed of ten syllables, left aligned. It’s close to pentameter, butwritten without syllabic stresses – giving it a more prosaic rhythm. Her voice is very human, and the easiest to read by far – easing the reader into the poem.
- Sigmund, the Calypso’s architect, is, by contrast, written in lengthy stanzas, with twelve syllables to a line, and is right aligned. This gives him more of a bombastic, grand register – his sections and reflective, and historical, giving weight to the Calypso’s design and philosophy.
- Catherine is easily the most experimental. She is post-human, and cognitively enhanced, and her verse reflects that. She breaks completely out of the rhythms that syllable counts give, and into a very different kind of rhythm, informed by concrete verse that resembles a waveform. At times, even that splits and breaks open, breaking the rhythm in ways that illustrate her capabilities.
- The Herald opens in strict pentameter, before loosening up into syllabic verse at ten syllables a line. His verse is centre-aligned, and justified in a column. I developed him to represent the epic oral tradition; his section is a recitation of the history of the Calypso while it was in flight.
Who was the trickiest character to write?
Each character was a challenge in their own right – a puzzle to solve. For the three written in syllabic verse, I really enjoyed puzzling the lines together, and for Catherine, getting the shape of her verse to work was immensely satisfying. The biggest challenge was definitely the Herald, though. I had it in mind I would write him in strict pentameter, before almost immediately being confronted by the ways in which pentameter affect the text; it gives it a very particular rhythm, and shifts it a long way away from prose, to a place that makes it difficult to read in the same way that modern readers enjoy novels. There is still some in there – at the opening of his section – but it’s ended up being more flavoursome. In the end, I got the Herald to work by using register instead of a stricter verse-form, opting for a grand and sometimes archaic tone to carry the weight of his epic storytelling.
In the story we get SF ideas such as terraforming explored in something more flowing and wondrous. How do you approach writing such scenes?
A lot of Calypso comes from Paradise Lost, and figuring out fascinating ways of translating Milton’s interpretation of the biblical Genesis into something sweeping and science-fictional. For instance! Milton’s God creates light before He creates the sun, and in Paradise Lost that’s characterised by glowing clouds. So the Calypso generates clouds of reflective nanites, to help terraform the new world! Of course, as Calypso goes on, this gets stranger and stranger; perhaps the strangest chapter of all being Catherine’s transformation. Each part of the terraforming process – of which there are seven! – was a real creative thrill to write.
Who are some of your favourite poets?
I’m going to use this question to wax lyrical about WilliamBlake for a moment, who was key when it came to thinking about Calypso. You see, Blake was a prolific epic poet, and wrote some extraordinary verse in his time, each page etched onto gorgeous, illustrated plates. But too often these days, I see versions of his poems printed without those plates. There’s a lack of understanding, perhaps, that those plates – those illustrative elements – are as much the poem as the written parts. And there’s bits of Calypso that are like that, too; bits where words wouldn’t work for what’s on the page.
Besides Milton and Blake, I’ve got a lot of love for the work of more contemporary poets like Alice Oswald (for Dart, and Woods etc.), and Ed Dorn (for Gunslinger), who have done some amazing, experimental work – thinking through things like voicing nonhumans, and creating splendid extended verse narratives.
What else can we look forward to from you in the future and in this weird world of social media where can we find out more?
I’ll level with you – the fate of any future verse-novels from me, at least in the near future, rests on how well Calypso fares out in the world. It was – I won’t lie to you – really difficult to get published, and even then it came down to the passion of some extraordinary people advocating for it. So, I’ve got my fingers crossed, but we’ll see how that pans out! Otherwise, I’m working on some more novels in prose (and maybe sneaking a bit of verse into it – but nobody tell my publisher!), and even a bit of collaborative work with the brilliant Aliya Whiteley (something to watch out for!)
You’re right – social media is weird. Right now, the best place to keep up with my stuff is definitely over on Instagram. You can find me at https://www.instagram.com/oliverklangmead/
What great books have you read recently?
I’ve been blessed with a really strong run of reading recently, some of which you’ve been praising as well! I loved Kelly Link’s The Book of Love, which was an absolute indulgence of a book, and I had a great time with Simon Jimenez’s The Spear Cuts Through Water, which was just the fantastical epic that I needed at the time. I also recently finally got around to Nabokov’s Pale Fire, which was exactly the versaic, lyrical, bizarre, experimental novel I hoped it would be; I love the sections in Bladerunner 2049 where Agent K is made to recite parts of it, and putting them into context only increased my appreciation of that movie!
