I asked Jessica what had come first as she was composing "Bourbon, Sugar, Grace" - the main character, the plot, or the world. She told me that the main character, Fox, had come to her first. In an early draft, Fox was on the train during an accident; in the Tor.com version, Fox comes to the wrecked train well after the accident occurs.
The story takes place on a mining planet, where the people living on the planet have been abandoned by the mining company that brought them there. The planet itself is inhospitable, requiring atmospheric assistive technology, so that people can only rely on breathable air in certain small regions, and outside those regions they must rely on "oxygen filaments" implanted at birth. These oxygen filaments are a finite, "critically limited" resource.
The planet has been mined past the point of stability, and become what Jessica calls "a geothermal lacework." This results in "gurges," which are basically eruptions of the planet's mantle material. It is one of these that causes the train wreck.
The name of the main habitation zone is Drumtown. It features living structures with algae lattices that enhance air quality. The filaments are what allow people to leave this area.
I asked Jessica where she did most of her research for this story. She said that she probably did the least research on the mining aspects of the story, but she did look at imagery of mines and read first-person accounts from miners. She also relied on knowledge that she'd gained while doing research for a previous book into mineral structures.
She said she did more research about how to construct habitations in inhospitable environments, including living buildings, cities where buildings are living things. She also researched vertical farming and water reclamation.
There are several tiers in the society on this planet. You have people who are higher up in the mining corporation - executives, scientists - and then you have miners and techs who make up most of society. The miners and the techs got together to form co-ops to give them relative independence from the corporate oversight, a little like unions. The train takes people between the mines and the different settlements.
In the story, Fox gets sent out to salvage something at a request from a scientist, and is given a scanner that indicates when it detects the object a bit like a geiger counter. Fox herself doesn't know what she's looking for, which I found interesting.
One of the interesting and delightful things about the story is the way that Jessica contrasts the vitality of people's lives with its fragility, and the sense that disaster could strike at any moment. Both of Fox's parents are alive, and they are both referred to as "moms" even though one of them is physically male. I remarked that it's really refreshing to see parents in a story. Jessica told me that they were really important, because she wanted there to be a sense of community to contrast with the way the society itself was abandoned by its corporate overlords. Vibrant, yet tenuous. Jessica says, "that's us."
She says she is fascinated by cities and by what people accomplish when they come together. The community coming together leads to enhanced chances of survival.
Morgan remarked that the idea Jessica used of a farther-off settlement that got fewer services, reminded her of her own road, because she lives at the end of it and her area is always last to be paved or plowed. It was similar to the way the train ran in the story.
Che asked if Jessica was planning any sequels. Jessica told us she doesn't have any pre-planned, but she likes the family a lot, so "it could happen."
After that, we talked a bit about Jessica's novel, Substrate Phantoms, which came out about a month ago. It takes place in the same science fictional universe, but at a much later time. It's "way far future SF." Jessica told us she takes inspiration from C.J. Cherryh, Samuel L. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Tanith Lee.
In this universe, the interstellar society is called "The Aggregate." People live on planets, on stations, and on ships. They travel via "spin drive" or "wave space," also called "the substrate."
Jessica told us that far future SF is "my happy place." She's more daunted by near future SF scenarios. She likes to take all the cool stuff that she's read and the science we have now, and extrapolate them.
She told us she really hopes to avoid a "white universe" or "monoculture universe." Diversity is very important to her portrayals.
She calls her work "social science fiction space opera," and she says she loves to get into different cultures and art. This is a future that hasn't kept the worst aggressiveness of our current cultures. Women do "whatever the hell women want." Problems do arise, however, from splinter religious groups and from general-purpose greed. The novel centers on Termagenti Station, and the inhabited planet Ashe. It involves "planet shaping," or terraforming.
Jessica says that she doesn't use traditional chapter structure. The novel begins with a haunting on the station. I asked her about languages in this world, and she said that people mostly used "standard trade language," but that she has "reams and reams of notes" on religions, beliefs, art, mourning rites, curses, magic, economics, and other topics. She describes herself as taking existing things from our world and making mosaics with them. She wants to honor existing things, and also examine how they change.
The main character in the novel, Methian, is a bit like a movie-maker, because he works with virtual reality technology. He's a story coordinator, doing a documentary exposing corruption in his own family. As you can imagine, this leads to trouble!
Jessica has invented a type of interactive sculpture for this world, and "holoboxes" that play little stories. It's fun, but also work. There's a mural on the station that tells a story central to the beliefs of the system's inhabitants. There are clubs, sports, and restaurants. Jessica told us she enjoys considering the differences in worldview between people who live on ships or stations and those who live on planets, which they refer to as "gravity wells." Her concept of "spin drive" is built hand-wavingly on the idea of quantum spin and the concept of wormholes.
Jessica, thank you so much for joining us! It was a pleasure to learn about your work. Remember that for the next three weeks, Dive into Worldbuilding will be hosted by Che Gilson. This week we'll meet on Wednesday, June 21 at 10am Pacific. The topic of discussion will be Bribery.
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