Interviewing Vajra Chandrasekera

Hellooo!

I recently reviewed the excellent fantasy novel The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera a fascinating tale of a world of magic, politicians, love and family secrets combined with some absolutely gorgeous writing. I was very lucky to have the opportunity to ask Vajra some questions about this novel and more!

Hellooo!

Hello! Thanks for having me!

How do you like to booktempt people into reading The Saint of Bright Doors?

It would very much depend on the person I’m talking to, and what I understand of what they like to read. But more generally, I might say something like: it’s a story about a young man trying not to become a weapon in the war between his magical, powerful parents and instead becoming one in a revolution against a fascist state. These are wars fought not in battle scenes but in who gets to tell their version of history, in whose world overrides the other, in who defines and who gets defined, in disappearances and erasures and stories within stories. There are devils and dances, executions and exorcisms, theatrical performances and scientific experiments. There are doors that will never open for us, if we’re lucky. 

Fantasy has always loved its Chosen Ones but here we meet the Unchosen what drew you to this idea for Fetter and his colleagues?

Unchosen ones also have a long tradition! From Granny Weatherwax to the protagonist of She Who Became the Sun. Subversions of the chosen one are probably as common as actual chosen ones, because there’s nothing more fun about a trope than messing about with it. In this case, my interest was in stories that are marginal to what would be or is expected to be the “main story” in that kind of narrative. The back roads are more interesting to me than the well-worn highway, and in the same vein, losers are intrinsically more interesting than perfect(ible) heroes. The frustration, envy, despair, the ways in which they redirect and sublimate their energies, I feel it gives those characters a useful restlessness.

A bit like the doors everything in the novel has a feeling of being more than one thing at one time from Fetter, his parents and even the wider world and it’s history. Was this a theme you wanted to explore?

Yes, absolutely. I find it disappointing when a speculative setting somehow manages to convey less depth than the day’s newspapers. To me this has always read as the same colonial flattening effect that reduces entire foreign cultures and nations to caricatures. I think there is a powerful effect in making a story seem like a window into a much bigger world than the story could possibly depict in its entirety, much less contain—a telescopic lens, even, that gives you magnified, clear glimpses at something that makes you yearn to see more, only when you try to pan across you lose track of where you were. The effect is not only technical but political (as is generally true of questions of technique) in that it is also an attempt to mirror the world’s complexity in art, in a way that recognizes that complexity and its irreducibilities, its lack of certainties, and show characters doing the best they can with limited knowledge. Many books, including in speculative fiction, do this incredibly well, because prose fiction is better at this effect than any other artform (well, of course I would think so.) If only those tools weren’t often left untouched in the box. Sometimes the wrapping is still on.

Luriat is a key part of the story a modern, cultured and large place sought as a form of peace and incredibly dangerous if you fall foul of those in power.  How did this city evolve?

Luriat is simply my city, or any city. Luriat is the condition of urban modernity. Every city is exactly like this, or not far from becoming it. The violent policing and the legal systems segregated by some formulation of race, caste, and class should be deeply and unhappily familiar in cities in the first and third world alike.

Sometimes I’m surprised by when I see readings of the book online is the tendency to read it as a story about a place far away from the reader, perhaps in some version of Sri Lanka, an “authoritarian” society. And of course, it is some version of Sri Lanka, as is everything I write. But you only have to pay attention to who your local cops are beating, arresting, disappearing, murdering: we all live in an authoritarian society. The same one, in fact, with minor local variations. State terror laws, usually under the ironic title of counterterrorism laws, are the same everywhere: imprisonment or murder for anybody who looks funny at or to a cop. State censorship is the same everywhere, whether it’s Sri Lanka’s ICCPR Act that imprisons comedians and poets or New York State’s Executive Order 157 that prevents, for example, institutions like Lambda Literary from endorsing PACBI because they need public funding to survive. This city is everyone’s city.

How is the Sri Lankan SF & Fantasy scene and are there any authors you recommend we should be reading?

I wrote up a very brief history of Sri Lankan speculative fiction (as far as I’m aware of it) last year, in which I name some of the Sri Lankan writers who’ve published English-language sff work in the last twenty years or so. Many of these writers haven’t yet published anywhere as much as I’d like! We have just as much talent on the island as off it, but it’s a poorer country than most and opportunities are limited locally. I hope more Sri Lankan writers choose seek publication elsewhere in the world, including more translations of Sinhala and Tamil fiction into English for global readers.

Specifically for new books out in 2024: Yudhanjaya Wijeratne is a Nebula-nominated writer and his new novel Pilgrim Machines comes out later this year. International Thriller Writers Award winner Amanda Jayatissa’s Island Witch just came out a few months ago. Definitely do check both of them out, and their other books. There are also many Sri Lankan writers writing excellent literary fiction in English. Shehan Karunatilaka and Anuk Arudpragasam both had Booker nominations in the ’20s, and Shehan actually won—with a story about a ghost detective solving his own murder, so the genre inflection felt very strong to me. V.V. Ganeshananthan won the Carol Shields Prize and the Women’s Prize for Brotherless Night in the last few months, and Shankari Chandran won the Miles Franklin Award last year. It feels like a moment in which Sri Lankan writers in English across the genre spectrum are doing better now than ever, and I hope that keeps expanding.

What else can we look forward to from you in the future and in this weird world of social media where can we find you for more details?

I edited Afterlives: The Year’s Best Death Fiction 2023  for Psychopomp, which just came out in July. And I’ll have a new story—my first novelette, in fact—out in October. It’s called “The Limner Wrings His Hands” and it will be in the anthology Deep Dream from MIT Press, edited by Indrapramit Das. You can preorder it at that link.

I’m currently working on my third novel, though I don’t expect to have news to announce about it until next year at the earliest.

The best place to reliably find me is my website, vajra.me. I keep information about my books and other publications up to date and have a blog-slash-newsletter for detailed updates as well as occasional essays. I’m on a bunch of social media platforms too, for as long as they remain usable: Twitter, Bluesky and Instagram are where I’m most active these days. And I have a Patreon, where I sometimes post behind-the-scenes updates, thoughts on process, and draft essays, as well as recover previously published short stories that are no longer accessible anywhere else. 

If there was one book, not your own, you wish you could get everyone to read what would it be and why?

This year, I’d say Premee Mohamed’s The Siege of Burning Grass, a stunning novel that has a great deal to say about war, pacificism, and the struggle to hold to your ideals in the face of the tremendous pressure that a war-obsessed society can place upon you. Essential reading in 2024.