Charlie and Eliza Chan (Fathomfolk) discuss many questions of immigration in both reality and her fantasy fiction, the different mythological creatures she used and decisions in regards to location inspiration, and Fathomfolk’s controversial ending.

Please note there is a spoiler in this episode for N K Jemisin’s The Fifth Season.

For live show tickets, click here.

General references:
The Witcher
Jessica Jones
The Untamed

Books mentioned by name or extensively:
Eliza Chan: Fathomfolk
Eliza Chan: Tideborn
N K Jemisin: The Fifth Season
R F Kuang: Babel
Rhonda Parrish (ed.): Sirens

Buy the books: UK || USA

Release details: Recorded 14th August 2024; published 23rd December 2024

Where to find Eliza online: Website || Instagram

Where to find Charlie online: Twitter || Instagram || TikTok

Discussions

02:25 The initial inspirations
04:34 More about the topic of immigration
06:57 World building and the world outside of Tiankawi
09:05 Creating Mira, Nami, and Cordelia
14:56 Having started with one narrative and changing it to three
17:44 Using different countries’ mythologies, originally planning to set Fathomfolk in a British city, and the possibility of historical settings
25:25 Kai’s significance and his relationship with Mira
28:59 Writing and pacing
31:23 Eliza’s ‘use’ of The Drawbacks and the response to the book
37:06 The Onseon engine
39:20 Dragon pearls
42:25 The themes of motherhood and friendship
46:18 The use of gods
49:46 The controversial ending!
51:25 Book two, Tideborn
52:23 Harbour Of Hungry Ghosts
53:52 The game of Wulan

Transcript

Please note that this transcript has been edited for legibility and is not a 100% accurate representation of the audio. Filler words and many false sentence starts have been removed, and words have been added in square brackets for clarity.

[Recorded later] Charlie: Hi everyone. So last week I published a very brief announcement onto the podcast, and then found out that not everybody had been sent it in their subscriptions. So here it is: on Wednesday 26th February, I’m very happy to announce that I will be holding my very first podcast live show. The guests will be Alex Hay, Stacey Thomas, and Lucy Barker, and it will be at Goldfinch Books in Alton, Hampshire. If you want to come, do book your tickets soon – there are a limited number available – and the ticket link is in the show notes.

Charlie: Hello and welcome to The Worm Hole Podcast episode 112. Bringing on an author and talking with them, about one – occasionally more – of their books in detail, and if you find yourself enjoying today’s episode, do share it with your friends. I’m Charlie Place and joining me today is Eliza Chan. We’ll be talking about Fathomfolk, her debut novel. Set in the semi-submerged fantasy city of Tiankawi, the book looks at a lot of subjects within the topics of migration and racism, where a non-human group of people, the fathomfolk, are living as second-class citizens. Most fathomfolk can shift into human form but they are always identifiable by the gills on their necks. Mira, the half-human half-siren captain of the border guard, is trying to do her best work in a position where she feels the burden to be an absolutely upstanding member of the fathomfolk, representing all of them as the token diversity hire. She wants to improve life for her people and strives to do so. Nami, a water dragon, who, in her culture, is thus privileged, is in Tiankawi trying to change things also, but meets a group of fathomfolk whose planned way to change the system is pretty extreme. And Cordelia, a sea witch, is posing as a human to her fairly high-up in the ranks human husband. She’s been manipulating his thoughts and often makes bargains with other folk to gain power. We follow each woman as they strive to help create a better society or, in Cordelia’s case, to make life better, essentially just for herself. Hello Eliza!

Eliza: Hello Charlie. Thanks for having me on!

Charlie: It is lovely to have you on and it has been quite a journey and a very, very nice one, reading your book. I would like to start on, can you tell us about the initial inspirations and the further inspirations, et cetera, of Fathomfolk?

Eliza: Yes, of course. It was a bit of an evolution this one; people say, ‘what was the spark moment?’ I don’t think there was one – I think there was numerous. So before I wrote Fathomfolk, I wrote a lot of short fiction and I’ve always been into mythology. So pre-Covid times when I used to do a lot of travelling, I would pick up different mythologies from whatever country I would visit and surprise, surprise, there’s a lot of mythology based around the water, which makes sense because water is essential for life, and I was finding these commonalities. And at the same time I’m also being quite into feminist retellings and I think specifically the water mythology is quite right for that because there’s a lot of femme fatales and seductresses and I was like, right, I want to tell their stories and claim them back. Before that I wrote a bunch of short stories around different mythological characters like selkies and mermaids. And the idea evolved over time. So I had this idea of it being a stand in for multiculturalism and also that it wasn’t just one, it wasn’t just the mermaid story or the kelpie story, it was a mixture of the different people’s stand ins for immigration and the fact that immigrant experience isn’t a monolith – it completely depends on where you come from and your reasons for immigration. And very aptly, I guess, whilst I was drafting there was – I would say the start, but I think it’s always been ongoing – a lot of the media attention on immigration and the Calais crisis at the time and it all sort of merged in my head and it made so much sense for the fathomfolk to represent that sort of experience.

Charlie: Okay, all right. There’s lots there I’m going to ask you about in general. But can you talk more about… you’ve given us a really good and quite detailed standing point, so forgive me for asking for more, but can you tell us more about your employment in the novel, if that makes sense, of immigration and that topic, using it in your book?

Eliza: Yeah. So yeah, as you’ve already mentioned in your lovely summary at the beginning, the city is majority human and the fathomfolk are the minority population. And there’s different reasons they’ve come in to work and live in this human city. Some of it is reasons of pollution, environment and climate change, some of it is economical, because there are better jobs in the city, and some of it is because their homes have actually been destroyed. And I specifically wanted to show it wasn’t all the same reason, because in our world there are lots of different reasons people travel. And on top of that, I didn’t want everyone to be Nami. So Nami is very much the character whom it’s very helpful to follow at the beginning of the novel because she’s new to the city so you can use her viewpoint to say, ‘haha! Tour guide you across the whole city’, but at the same time she’s a leader coming in and I wanted to show that not all diaspora folk or immigrants are necessarily that fresh to a city. So both Mira and Cordelia, the other two viewpoint characters, have actually lived and been born in this city for one generation – in Mira’s case – in Cordelia’s it’s several generations. So using that as a stand in of, ‘just because someone looks different doesn’t mean they haven’t always belonged here’. And I guess it very much spoke to me that sort of physical difference as opposed to actually, cultural differences and the nuances within the minority population. Because I was asked, I remember early on, I think it was by my agent, why I hadn’t chosen any of the viewpoint characters to be a human because that would be the obvious foil, your human point of view and fathomfolk. But all three are fathomfolk. And for me it was because I wanted to centre the story around them and show it isn’t a monolith, it isn’t one person’s experience is exactly the same as someone else – just because on the outside they have these things in common, character-wise and personality and background is entirely different.

Charlie: That was a question I had, so that’s interesting to hear that from you, yeah. One thing that you’ve made me think here and it is something that I wondered about – do you have any concept of what the outer world is away from the city? Can you tell us anything about that?

Eliza: Yeah. So I’m not the best world builder, I would say – I built my story around a need to know basis. So I very much felt like I wanted this big sprawling city state, semi-submerged with these towery skyscrapery buildings, and that was the heart of her story. Obviously I’d have a reason as to why there was this big city and pretty much not a lot else. So very vaguely in book one I do describe that there are four underwater havens, one of which is the one that Nami’s come from, Yonakuni, and there are three others described in passing, one of which has already fallen. And it’s quite vague, I would say, in book one, as to the world out there, other than the fact that there’s been a climate crisis and the water level has risen. And because of industrialisation, often, which was due to the humans, there’s a lot of pollution in the waters, which is why the fathomfolk are coming out of the water. I do a bit more in book two, if you are interested in the greater world – so there are various sea nomads, there are pirates, there’s supposed to be smaller human populations, but not as big is this. This is the metropolis in the world. I thought I was getting away with not doing world building by doing it as quite a modern world; what I ended up doing is world building where I really needed it and getting massively in depth and then doing that thing where the rest of the world falls off the page, in book one. But, yeah, I do fill that in a bit more in book two, which I really enjoyed as well.

Charlie: I mean, you have left potential for quite a big scope, if you want to. And it sounds like you’re realising it then, definitely [Eliza: yes]. Which is exciting. Yeah. Something I did notice is that you have a lot of character development in your book. There was a point in your book where I thought, I want to call this literary fantasy. That’s not a genre I’ve heard of before, but there is a lot of character development. Could you talk to us more about these three characters and how you came to create them?

Eliza: Yes, my three main characters. So the story for me always started with Nami, because, as I said, she is the new arrival and it’s all through her eyes. And I wanted a character that is very angry at the injustices in the world and basically wants to punch something. She wants to change it immediately. She is sick and tired of people saying, ‘we’ll take our time and that’s not the way you do it. And you don’t understand’. She’s very young and she’s full of a lot of anger and her heart’s in the right place. But I also wanted to portray that when you are that angry and often when you are that young, you may not have the full picture. And she is very much a blazes guns in sort of person that doesn’t really think through the consequences or think of the wider picture of things. So she’s the young hothead character. And I also wanted to discuss how potentially, that naivety, but also that goodness, can end up actually in quite a bad place if you fall in with the wrong crowd. I did have a lot of thoughts about people I know who have ended up in the wrong crowds or just generally thinking of news stories and why people end up in certain circles that are not where they started from and their intentions are good at the beginning, how they can get misled, possibly groomed, possibly coerced, that sort of relationship that you may think is good on the surface, but actually ends up being something quite bad for you. And I specifically made Nami quite a privileged character. She’s a water dragon, and within the fathomfolk, that’s almost royalty. So they’ve got quite a high status. And because of that, she’s not had to face a lot of the injustice first-hand. And she potentially hasn’t seen the warning signs that some of the other characters have because she doesn’t have that life experience. So that was very much who I thought of to start with, to build the story around. Now, because of the journey Nami goes through, which I think is incredibly important, I also think she’s quite a frustrating character even for me to write, because you kind of want to shake her. And I think that’s good that you get the strong emotions, but I wanted to have a foil, a sensible character. So in came Mira. So Mira’s the biracial, she’s half-siren, she’s second generation, she’s a little bit older, she’s come from quite a working class background where she’s had to fight for everything. And because she’s had to fight for everything, she knows what restrictions are in place, she knows what laws are in place, she knows that she is basically being touted as this model minority tokenism because she’s the highest ranking officer in all of the Tiankawi government – she’s in the border guard and she’s a captain and she knows that. But at the same time she knows that she can do good within the system. And for me it was the opposite way of change. Some people, as you say, allegorically to our real world, there is a way of changing the system from within by changing the laws, by showing people that you aren’t just a stereotype. And she’s the very slow and steady one. In many ways less exciting in this novel. She’s not gonna punch things as easily. But it’s also really important for me to portray that difference. And then the third character, Cordelia, is the sea witch. Now Cordelia initially just came in as a bit of a joke character, there as like evil relief [both chuckle] and she’s very much based on Ursula from The Little Mermaid. She comes in, she strikes bargains, she’s very devious, she’s got her fingers in every pot, she doesn’t really care about folk. But the more I drafted, the more I actually started to sympathise with her point of view, because the other two are very earnest and they’re trying their best. but there are people that just think, ‘why bother? The system’s broken. I will just do the best I can for me and maybe my family. But if the system’s broken, you can’t fix it. You know what? I’m just going to exploit every loophole’. And I would say we’ve all met that person in life. And I think, especially when, in my book, if these are stand ins for immigrant or minority population, not everyone is there to uplift other members of the population, there are people that just think, ‘meh, do what I want for myself’. And it became quite freeing actually, to write from that point of view. I also just really like her, as I say, as a stand in for Ursula, because I think Ursula gets a bad rep as being the evil sea witch in The Little Mermaid, when ultimately she told Ariel the small print. It’s not like she hid it. Ariel signed that contract. She’s the idiot. Ursula was just being a good businesswoman or a good lawyer, whatever you want to call her, like, it was all actually above board. So I quite enjoyed that as well. And that was a good foil for Mira and Nami because they’re so earnest, both of them, in their own ways, to have someone that just goes, screw it, I’ll do what I want.

Charlie: Can we have your reimagining of The Little Mermaid at some point? That’d be fascinating.

Eliza: Well, this pretty much is subtly my reimagining of The Little Mermaid [Charlie: It is, true]. Because my other bugbear with The Little Mermaid is she does all of this for a man that she saw once in a boat. And I’m very much like, ‘no, come on’. Whereas Mira’s basically the stand in for the Little Mermaid and she does all of this for her mother, who she loves and makes so much more sense to me than this random hot dude on a boat.

Charlie: That’s true. That’s true. Okay, so I’ve heard that you started with one narrative. I suppose I want to ask what was that like? And when you moved away into the three narratives and that kind of process at that time?

Eliza: Yeah, that was interesting. So as I said before, I come from short fiction, so short fiction is quite good that you can just wing it. And I’ve been trying to write a novel forever and just kept starting 10, 20,000 words and giving up. I wouldn’t say follow my methodology [chuckles] it was bad, but it’s interesting for people to hear that. It’s not like you get it right first time. So initially, I tried to write from Nami’s point of view. And I was really struggling, as I say, because she’s a frustrating character. She’s supposed to be. She’s supposed to go in this learning journey. But also I realised I couldn’t show all sides of the city because there was no reason for her to have a close relationship with many of the people in the city because I’d built her up to be this privileged dragon. She would meet certain people, but she wouldn’t have that very friendly relationship with the taxi drivers or the people working in the hawker stalls. And I had done a very close narrative. So I think I got about a third of the way in. And at the time I had this amazing mentor called Maisie Chan. I gave her 20,000 words at a time and she was like, ‘just keep writing, just keep writing, even if it’s rubbish’. And I got to a stage that I was like, ‘I’m not sure I like her any more’. And she said, ‘just try writing something from another character’s point of view. Keep going’. Because what I would normally have done, I think, without her mentorship, is I would have scrapped it or I would have gone back to the beginning, and she was like, ‘just write from another character’s point of view and see how it goes’. And that’s how Mira and then Cordelia got added in. And then I really, really enjoyed them. So I got to the end of that draft and then I had to go back and put them in properly from the beginning. And I found that a lot more well-rounded because I could show different parts of the city that would make sense for each character to see. Because as you mentioned, Cordelia, she’s a shapeshifter, so she’s very much in the elite masquerading as a human, so you could see all the human elite that Nami and Mira wouldn’t really have that connection with. And then Mira can go and hang out with all of the, yes, street sellers and all of the people from her childhood and her mum and stuff. So it felt like more of a living city to have multiple point of views rather than just all be Nami.

Charlie: Okay, it’s interesting and actually hearing your process there, you’ve done a lot of work. That’s quite an extensive amount of work. I can’t imagine, okay, I’m not a writer, but editing that much, and you’ve got so much of Nami and then you’ve got some of Mira and some Cordelia and you’re taking it all the way to the end and then coming back and putting it together, my goodness. Talking of the mythologies, I would like to reel us back and just ask you if you can tell us about incorporating these different mythologies into your book. And I think I heard something like you started it as a novel set in a British city or something, and just how you came to what you’ve got in, in that way, if that’s okay?

Eliza: So as I briefly mentioned, it started from writing short fiction and sort of bouncing off it. So I had a short story published years ago, probably over a decade ago, and it was in an anthology about sirens. So it was asking you to reimagine sirens. And that’s where Mira’s story came from. She was a siren PI in that version in a semi-flooded city. And it was very much an ode to Jessica Jones supporting other women in situations of domestic violence and stuff. And that story stuck with me. So I think because of that story and it very much being an urban fantasy-esque short story, my first version was very much urban fantasy in a very European-centric modern city. Vaguely Manchester because I live here, vaguely London because it was the obvious model. And in my head, I think, because it was more contemporary, that’s what I saw. I saw western cities, as many of us do. When I started drafting it and building this world, I started to really struggle, because actually, I wanted to look for how the city could be semi-submerged and started looking at architecture and boats and things. And it’s actually really hard to imagine with a city like London or Manchester, what it would look like. I was thinking of the canal longboats, and that was about it. And everything I kept seeing would take me back to my travels and pictures of East and Southeast Asia, which makes so much more sense in hindsight because they are already dealing with monsoon rains, with rainy season, with typhoons, they’re already stilt houses. Culturally they’re boat people, communities that live their whole lives in boats. It’s right there basically. And I started thinking, what am I doing? Why am I trying to set this in a western city? And I think it’s just one of those things that evolved and it very much taught me that even in my head because you know, my background is I’m from the Chinese diaspora, and I do write Chinese characters and Asian characters, but I think in my head, I was thinking, if it’s going to be that sort of fantasy, Asian fantasy, it would be your proper, untamed, wuxia, C-drama, historical vibes. And when I was thinking modernity, I didn’t initially do that. And even I reflected and thought, why? There’s this weird cultural bias that I’m assuming modernity must equal Western. And actually, if you look at a lot of Asian cities – Singapore, Hong Kong – they are multicultural. They’re a different form of multiculturalism. So Hong Kong, the majority of the population is Han Chinese, but there are also pockets of Filipino, Malaysian, Indian, Bangladeshi population brought over because of colonialism, but there are these populations and we sort of forget about it and we assume a lot of the other big cities in the world are monolithic and only New York and London could possibly be multicultural. So once I thought, in my own biases, I actually thought, it’s actually incredibly important for me to push forward with this as a East and Southeast Asian-inspired but modern and multicultural city. Because that made so much more sense. In terms of the other part of your question, all the mythologies, I think, again, because then that got in my head it was going to be multicultural. I thought, well, it makes sense. It’s not just going to be the mythologies from Asia. So I do have water dragons, I have kappas, I have Jang Jamari, which are Korean, Naga. But then I thought, it’s multicultural, so why wouldn’t we also have the sea creatures from Scotland, from France, from anywhere that I could pick? So in the end, I’ve just mashed them all together. So we do have kelpies, we’ve got sea witches, we’ve got a bit of everything. Basically, what I wanted to write, I have just given myself permission to include all the mythologies I fancied writing that I could do a bit of research on. I tried to keep away from ones that are very current contemporaneously, like religious figures. I just thought, I’m going to keep away from that because I want to be respectful. But different world mythologies, I just thought it makes sense when I’m building a melting pot city, it makes it more fun and it gives that visual aspect, as I’ve already mentioned, that just because they’re all fathom folk doesn’t mean they’re the same – as you say, some of them are shapeshifters, some of them aren’t. Some have tentacles, some have fins, some have scales. It’s more of a mix than you initially expect.

Charlie: I mean, as a reader, I could keep up with it, because I suppose we’ve got it there. That must have been very difficult for you to keep up as a writer.

Eliza: It is. I have my own little document with all the glossary, I guess, of yeah, which culture and roughly which appearance we think each of these have. Yeah, that was really fun to refer back to. And I think in hindsight, if I was doing it again, I would have asked there to be a glossary, I guess, included in the book, but I didn’t think of that at the time. But I think I’m also slightly nervous because obviously some of them, depending on oral traditions and where you read, some of them say, this creature looks like this, and then another source will say, actually it looks like that. So I quite liked keeping it a bit vague in that way.

Charlie: Reader interpretation, yeah. There was something – I’m big on my history, so I heard something there that I want to ask you. Correct me if I’m wrong – it seemed to me that at some point you considered doing it historical?

Eliza: So not… okay. So what I think is, one day I want to write a historical fantasy based in… you know like the very ancient China [Charlie: yeah], but with magic that is in many ways quite trending at the moment. And I do think it’s due to a lot of C-dramas like the Untamed and those, because they’re beautiful and they’re wuxia-based. And I love watching those dramas. I am very scared of writing within those dramas because there’s such a long history and there’s so many dramas and novels and people that like them – really, really like them. And I’m terrified that they’re going to say, ‘you’ve done it wrong’. And I think in my own head thinking, I’ll do something more modern – so Tiankawi is very much, I would say somewhere between like 1930s to 1950s technology, but Singapore or Hong Kong – I thought I was getting away from anyone saying, ‘you’ve done that wrong’, because no one could tell me I’d done it wrong because [both chuckle], you know, it’s semi-submerged and it’s Asian and it’s 1930s-50s, whereas I think there’s certain time periods which I love reading and I love watching, but are massively beloved by a large population. And I would like to have the confidence to do it one day but I’m also scared that everyone’s going to say, ‘well, you got this fact wrong, and that fact wrong, and that fact wrong [chuckles]. Yeah, so that’s what I meant when I was referring to the ancient history sort of stuff.

Charlie: Okay. Book six or seven, you can do it [both chuckle].

Eliza: I’m slowly going backwards in my timeline so I’ll get there eventually!

Charlie: Yeah, yeah. That’s interesting to hear about your rough… was it you said 1930s to 1950s because, yeah, I think I picked up on that. Whether that was just the way that my head went – I guess you said something in the book that made me cotton onto that bit. Mira’s role as captain of the border guard, we have that straight away. But we’ve also got with her, we’ve got her and Kai’s relationship. Yeah, I’d just like to ask you about the significance of that and where Kai came, or when, Kai came into the novel for you because he’s not a main character but he’s certainly significant in his own way?

Eliza: Okay. For me there’s a couple of things with Kai and Mira. I think firstly, I wanted to show a mixed race, multicultural, relationship that was not based in – this sounds bizarre – whiteness. Often what we see in the media is a mixed race couple where one of the couple is white and the other one is a person of colour. And I wanted to show very much there are two people of colour and they can still have their differences because they’re from different cultures. And so Kai is another water dragon, so he’s the older brother of Nami, and therefore he, similar to her, is from a very privileged, different background. But him and Mira are already an established couple. So that was my second thing – I really wanted an already established couple. I think Nami has all of her single flirtations going on, which I think is quite a staple of fantasy, but it’s very rare that we see a couple that’s, yeah, established. And they have the arguments, they have their differences, but they never question, the whole novel, their love for each other. That’s not the issue. Other issues come up, but they’re very stable, there’s not any, ‘I’m worried that he’s flirting with this other person or…’, none of that stuff because they’re more mature, there’s a bit older. And I think for me that was important because I think we get fixated with the first love in fantasy, which is obviously very exciting when we have it, but also a lot of people, myself included, are in more mature relationships, stable relationships, and that’s not often portrayed within the fantasy genre. So that was a definite reason I had him in there. I think the third one I was going to mention is – okay, so we’re going into spoiler territory now – I wanted very much to turn on the head that trope of the loyal girlfriend in the background, or the loyal wife, in fantasy, is always there when the hero’s off doing his thing, comes back, there’s the wife who cooks him dinner and looks after him and then at some point she is sacrificed. And that was very much what I was playing with with Kai and Mira. It was the other way round. He was the loyal one – that he was supportive in every way, almost too supportive to his end. But that was the trope I was addressing quite explicitly when I wrote him.

Charlie: Fascinating. I like this established couple that’s got less conflict. You’ve absolutely got Nami doing what ‘needs’, in quotes, to be done. I really want to ask another spoiler question then. This is moving us quite fast, so I will completely understand if you don’t want to answer this question. Is Kai coming back? If I say it like that?

Eliza: I will say we hear of Kai in book two.

Charlie: Okay.

Eliza: And then I’m not going to say anything more!

Charlie: Absolutely fine.

Eliza: So it’s not a definite yes or no, but he is certainly sort of in it, if that makes any sense?

Charlie: I wondered, because that’s how I felt at the end of it. It just felt like there’s some unfinished business there. And yeah, it definitely felt like some. I can’t define it. So we’ve talked about class, talked about hierarchy, and you have talked about the world building, which has been fascinating. And in that vein, actually, I suppose, I would like to ask you about how you paced the book and your choices here. And going into what you said yourself, you’ve got a lot of character development, but then certainly the plot does speed up, which also involves more of the world building, I think, coming in. And I want to ask you about the writing, how you paced it, that sort of stuff.

Eliza: I mean, I tried, like I very much got given all of the here’s the three arc, here’s the five arc, you know, way of structuring things. Try it out. And I think I tried that. I’m, not sure how much by the end it adheres to it because it’s changed so much over the drafts. I think I wrote the thing over four years, but then I then edited it even after that with my agent twice and then with my editor twice. So who knows where that pacing’s gone by the end! I think I did the old fashioned get out my little index cards, make sure the action scenes aren’t all squished together, make sure that, because there’s three point of view characters, that all of their scenes aren’t at the same time. And that’s about it. So I’ll say I, with all intentions started with a… I think it was 5 arc I followed, or was it 3? But who knows by the end if it was anywhere near that. Having said that again, I wouldn’t say if you’re listening to this for,’ I am a writer and want to take plotting advice’… this was very much trial and error for me. I’m hoping it’s clear that this was the first novel I’d finished since I was about 21 and when I was 21 I wrote a novel then I just sat in short fiction for absolutely years and was finally brave enough to finish this novel with the help of a mentor. So it was very much me learning as I went. So book two has definitely not changed as much as book one, I think I’ve become a better writer, I understand my process a bit more. But it was all trial and error at that stage when I was writing Fathomfolk.

Charlie: So it sounds a bit more like you are, how do people put it, a pantser. But actually I think, reading your book, it certainly seems more plotted than maybe it felt to you at the time. I don’t know. It comes across very flowy to me, it all flowed.
Eliza: It’s funny because that one definitely ended up being a pantser. But then ever since then, book two I plotted to minutiae and it worked. So I’m like, ‘oh, I don’t know!’ But then book two, obviously I didn’t have to do the world building or character building again again [Charlie: yeah], so I think I’ll only really know with my new book after that whether I’m a plotter or pantser. I think I’m probably somewhere in between, to be honest.

Charlie: Sure, sure. The drawbacks. Can you tell us more about them? And also you have covered it somewhat, but more about how we should, I suppose, feel about them, or just your general use of them.

Eliza: So the drawbacks are a fathomfolk protest movement. Who are there because they’re angry about the discrimination and prejudice that the fathomfolk are under in the city. They are portrayed very much as the extreme end. [It’s] hinted at that there are other more peaceful protest groups, but they are the very much, we need action. We can’t sit around and wait for these laws to slowly change’. They’re very appealing, they’re very loud and charismatic. So the leaders are Lynette, who is a kelpie, and then her second in command is Firth, one of the other kelpies that Nami finds an instant attraction to. And I guess for me, they are the appeal of the very angry, very loud voices in change. And they have that sort of rhetoric, ‘of we’ll do things fast’. So one of the main limitations fathomfolk have put on them is a bracer called pakkalot that stops them from using any of their water magic against humans, because the humans are basically terrified that they have let in these immigrants that potentially are bigger and stronger than them. So the only way they legally let them in is to put this device on their arm. And at one point, the implication of one of the rallies is that the drawbacks are able to neutralise this, which seems very exciting, ‘we can fight back!’ But there is always an undertone of violence. And I guess for me, they are there to show the allure of that rhetoric and the allure of violence, because I do think there’s certain ways in the novel that there’s a need for some level of change. But have they gone too far? And I very much wanted the book to ask questions about this and not necessarily give you a definitive answer, but they’re definitely the stand in for pure violence going too far, ‘is this the right way?’ Because the system is broken, for sure, it’s definitely broken, but is that the best way to fix it? The novel is basically there to show different people’s interpretations of how to fix it without necessarily saying this is right and this is wrong. There are aspects of each that are potentially a good way forward, but I wouldn’t say one on its own is necessarily the right way. And I think also, I had a lot of thoughts about violent protest and I’m not sure if the novel shows all these, but generally about the fact that very few peaceful protests enact change. A lot of times it has to result in violence for it to be brought to the media or the government attention, for there then to be change. But I don’t necessarily think the people always wanted it to end in violence, but that’s sometimes where it goes because things spiral out of control. And I guess for me it was very much thinking about this and thinking, what if the group were deliberately pushing for violence, since it’s going to go that way anyway, is that an appropriate way? Is that a right and just way of getting to that end? And I don’t have the answers, I just wanted to pose all the questions and get people thinking about it.

Charlie: In that vein, given you say, you get people questioning and wondering, how have you found the response to the book?

Eliza: I find it quite interesting, actually, because there are some readers that absolutely have loved it and said it’s made them think, that sort of symbolism. And some people are quite frustrated by it. And I do think that’s partly because they are reading it as a very straight allegory of real life and this is what we should do. Clearly it’s not because we don’t have, sadly, fins and gills in real life, it is a fantasy world. Honestly, if I really did have the answers, I would hopefully go into politics or try and go into law. I’m not; I’m writing a fiction book. But I think people get frustrated because we are almost conditioned by the fantasy action films that we see that the way forward is break things, fight things, and then it’ll all turn out good in the end. And that’s fun to watch on the TV, that action way first. I don’t know if it’s the right way in reality. And that’s why it’s very much for me, I want to ask a bunch of questions, I want you to discuss it in book groups. I can’t give you the answer because, as I say, if I did, I would hopefully be bringing world peace, if it was that easy! But I find it quite interesting – I think that the people that are frustrated are frustrated because they feel that it is saying that all violence is bad and that we should just sit back and take it. And I don’t think I am giving that message, but I think it is the actiony fantasy that’s telling us that that’s what you want next in a book. Sometimes you’re just like, ‘come on, just hit something, break something!’ It’s just intriguing, I think it is. I can see that myself as well – sometimes you just want things to happen because that’s the way we expect a book to go.

Charlie: Yeah, it’s a kind of conditioning from all the media we’ve been fed and stuff. But then no that’s interesting because we got to a point in the book where I thought, ‘goodness, this is quite an ending’. And then you have something that I thought, ‘oh, this [different one] is quite an ending’. And it’s interesting then that you’ve got, in the context of what you’ve been saying, these different elements where, again, as you’ve been saying, it’s not just the action movie – go towards the end, get the big battle, etcetera – you’ve got different things happening. Okay, in this book, it’s happening to the same small group of characters because they’ve got to have their narratives. We can’t have it from someone else entirely; it’s not going to work. But you have got these different questions and different bits of action that are happening anyway. On that, then, the [pronounces it] on-see-en engine, am I saying that right? [Eliza agrees.] Yeah, I didn’t see that coming at all. I don’t actually know what I saw coming. I suppose I want to ask, ‘why’ and, as well, maybe any inspirations.

Eliza: I think it mainly came from me thinking, ‘well, if humans are dominant in the city and they run the government, why would they let the fathomfolk in? Why would they let this immigrant population in?’ And sadly, in real life, generally it is for financial reasons, economic reasons that people – as much as we try and dress it up in the media as us being good and righteous, it’s often decisions are made for reasons of economics and profit. So I very much wanted there to be a profitable reason, but one that they’re trying to cover up in many ways for them to allow the fathomfolk population to come in. And I’d already built into it this idea that the fathomfolk have a level of water magic, water weaving, that was there and the humans were scared of because ultimately, if they didn’t have the bracer/pakkalot on them then they could potentially do more harm. Then why would they be letting in a people that they are scared of? And then it sort of just came to me. Well, it would make sense then that they could somehow harness this magic and then use it as a power source. There are nods – I’m sure this is a spoiler, if anyone has not read N K Jemisin, to N K Jemisin’s The Fifth Season books as well. I’m not sure if I read that book during drafting or not, but it obviously came from a similar place in our heads of, yeah, a group of people being used essentially for energy. And if you think about real world, like I say, politics and stuff, it often is the bottom line, isn’t it? The narrative that’s hidden behind the, ‘we’re helping because we’re the good guys’, is because there’s oil there or because there’s resources there, because we want something from that community. So, yeah, that’s how it came about.

Charlie: That is fascinating. It really was quite… well, that’s where we really took a turn, I think, into the science fiction. Talking of the further bits of the book, going back to the mythology, you’ve got the use of dragon pearls in the book, which is at the start of the book, and it’s also at the end of the book. I’m just wondering if you could talk more about your use of this?

Eliza: Yeah, so with Asian dragons, it’s really interesting because my mum… when I was a kid, we used to go to Chinese restaurants and the big Chinese restaurants would have a dragon holding a pearl and a phoenix, a Chinese phoenix. And I used to ask my mum what it’s about and what’s this pearl? And she would tell me these stories about how the pearl had the dragon’s soul in it. And [the dragon] would fall in love with the phoenix and the phoenix would say,’ but I want a present’, but if he gave up his pearl, he would die. And I was like, oh, this is a marvellous story. And then when I got a bit older and I read Chinese mythology books and I couldn’t find the story anywhere, and to this day I don’t know if my mum just made it up to keep me quiet in the restaurant or if it’s from her oral tradition and that’s just the story they told. But dragon pearls, there’s actually a lot of debate about what they represent. So you will nearly always see an Asian dragon holding a pearl, but there’s various stories where it represents a wish, it represents abundance. So there are stories where someone’s given the pearl and they put it in a pot of rice and the next day they have tonnes of rice, they put it in a pot of gold, they have tonnes of gold. There’s other ones where it’s literally a wish, almost like a genie in the lamp-style wish that you can make with the pearl. Sometimes it’s power. It’s basically not clear what it is – depends on which various folktale you’ve taken it from. And I thought this was really interesting and I thought I could play around with this. And for me it was very much, well, if it’s going to be some sort of big wish, it has to have a downside, otherwise it’s just fix everything, where’s the downside of having this wish? So that’s why I’ve built into the world that basically, the pearls, they are wishes, but to use them, you basically have to sacrifice the dragon’s life. So taking back to my mum’s story, whether or not she made it up, there we go, Mum, she’s part of the book. But then for me, dragon pearls, literally, they look like little eggs. And I thought, well, why not make it into both the idea of an egg – so an egg being the potential for something that’s unhatched as yet. And so there is, in the, like I say, opening scenes, the dragon pearl is part of a lighthouse. It’s used as a light. And it is literally the unborn potential of a sibling of Nami and Kai. It’s their unborn younger brother or sister. But it’s being held there as this lighthouse beacon also is basically part of the diplomatic relations between the underwater haven and the human city so that they know that there’s one more, but they haven’t hatched it, because if they hatch it, potentially the fathomfolk will be too powerful. So that’s why it’s kept as a captive, but also as a symbol of hope. And I just love the fact it could be this multitude of different things at the same time.

Charlie: Okay, well, you said, and I keep thinking we’ve got to bring it up, you’ve said about your mum. So I’m going to go to mothers, Mira’s mother, and also, if we put it together, friendship, because we’ve got Dan particularly. Can you talk about the theme, I suppose, of motherhood in terms of Trish, Mira, and friendship in the book?

Eliza: So I love looking at mother-daughter in particular, but mother to child relationships, because I don’t think they’re well explored necessarily within most of the fantasies I’ve read. And I think mother-daughter relationships are so important to me. And I think there’s a lot of tropes about the tiger mom in Chinese culture, very angry, very, ‘you must do this and you must overachieve’. And I think there are different forms of motherhood. So Trish, as you mentioned, who’s Mira’s mother, is very much this very nurturing mother who is incredibly supportive, is a bit of a nosy auntie matchmaker, but in the nicest way possible. And actually her character very much pulls Nami and Mira’s friendship together because she’s sort of the gel. There are other mothers also in the book. So Cordelia is a mother and she is the opposite – she really is the tiger mother who is very ambitious with their children, but also very cold and standoffish. And I wanted to show, yeah, different forms of mothers. And then very briefly, Nami’s mother’s at the beginning, Jiang Li, who you see more in book two. But I wanted to show there are different ways to be a mother. There’s no right way. And in a way there are different forms of love – is it love? You know, like it’s a different way of expressing your love for your child, which is debatable, whether you agree is a good way of expressing it. But they exist, and that’s why I wanted to show those different relationships. I would say, with friendships, Dan, to me, he was a very grounding character for Nami. He’s her only friend from the havens that you then meet in the city. And he’s one of the few people that is not intimidated by her status as this water dragon because basically he’s a kappa – kappas are from Japanese mythology; if you don’t know what they look like, they look like the cross between a duck, a frog and a turtle. If there was a hierarchy in the fathomfolk, he’d be quite low down because he can’t shape shift, he looks quite small and strange looking. Whereas a lot of the others, like the water dragons, can make themselves look humanoid, they’re seen as quite beautiful, they have a lot of magic and he doesn’t. So he’s almost one of those characters where he’s the only person she knows that’s from a different background because he’s supposed to be the scholarship kid when they’re in the havens. But also he doesn’t really give a damn if he gets in trouble for telling her off because he’s so far down the hierarchy that he’s just like, ‘I’m just going to be me’. And in a way she needs that grounding force, but she doesn’t have it for a lot of the novel because he gets imprisoned for part of it, so he only comes back later. In a way, she needs someone like that to keep her on the right path. And his absence is very telling to have the voice of reason next to her. But generally I really wanted to explore different friendships. Like the friendship that grows between Nami and Mira to me was also quite important because I think you see male bonding often in fantasy books like Band Of Brothers style. And I think sometimes women are either rivals or they end up being lovers, which is great, but I just wanted to see a very platonic friendship in there as well.

Charlie: No, I like how Dan, I want to say, comes into his own as a character in that where he is in the background, where you’re shifting him within the drawbacks and you bring him into the fore that way without giving him a narrative which is fascinating. He’s really brought to the fore. Something I found really fascinating is the titans and their role in creating the city. What was the sentence that the whale says through Mira? It says about how there was a sacrifice to help the city. Can you just tell us more about this? Your use of titans and gods?

Eliza: The use of gods is funny because I’ve always found religion in fantasy books, I’ve struggled with it a bit, so I wasn’t actually expecting to add it to my own fantasy book, and it ended up happening. I wanted to look at small shrines and folk traditions. Things like you might have someone that would make a sign of blessing or have a special amulet that they always touch and having those little things around the city, so they have little shrines to the sand gods, to me, it was very much an ode to people like my mum that would have their little shrines at home to worship local deities, but very much cast it in, ‘that’s a very old fashioned thing, that’s something the elders do’. It’s not really believed because Tiankawi is a very modern city and so a lot of the people in it are like, ‘that’s just the old ways that they do’. But I also wanted to show that actually the old and the new, it can be founded in something. So again, for me, looking at cities like Hong Kong. Hong Kong, if anyone imagines it, is an incredibly modern city. But it’s also an incredibly… I don’t want to say superstitious, but superstitious city. If you go to many buildings in Hong Kong, there isn’t a 14th floor because the number 14 is bad luck [Charlie: yeah]. It’s not seen as something in opposition that you can have that level of modernity, but also that level of folk belief. So that’s sort of in my head where it came from. I think in the reality of putting it in, I wanted something bigger than all of them. I wanted them to think we’re actually specks in the ocean. So I was thinking things like massive blue whales and stuff. And I was thinking, how can I bring this in? How can I make all of the characters realise their petty differences are insignificant? So that’s when it came in that actually underneath the whole city is a sleeping titan or so some call it a sand god or a titan. It’s not quite clear if it’s a god or just a really, really long living gargantuan being, because it could be one and the same. But again, once again coming back, this idea of change and sacrifice that they’ve clearly laid down their lives a long time before this city was founded to try and stabilise the city when the water level was rising. But in a way no one’s appreciated the sacrifice because they’ve actually entirely forgotten it even happened. And having that narrative, ‘of was it worth it? Was actually what they did worth it when there’s still all this squabbling atop their back?’ I just loved having that sense of awe but also the sense of was that the right choice? We still don’t know if it’s the right choice that they laid down their life for the city and actually people are still fighting. It almost comes in cycles, like the different generations will make a choice and you’ll never quite know if it’s the right choice, but all you can do is try.

Charlie: By all means, give me a yes or no answer – is this whole thing something you explore more in book two?

Eliza: Yes… yes. [Charlie: yeah?] I just think there to remember what happens in book two. Yes…? Yes.

Charlie: No, no, it’s a really interesting addition and it was something that I was really quite taken by when you had it. The ending, everyone getting gills. Very interesting, also potentially controversial, I think, given everything else. I suppose I want to ask, why did you choose to have this ending?

Eliza: I guess partly I didn’t want to just wipe out all of the human population at the end. Because ultimately, even though the story is about fathomfolk, I’m also showing that there are good humans in the city. Just because the government and the powers that be are being prejudiced doesn’t mean that everyone deserves to die. I think it also opens up a lot more controversies for book two because, yes, now they all look like fathomfolk because they all have gills – does that mean they are fathomfolk? And it opens up a whole new level of we are the same and yet we are still different. Because I think there are a lot of discussions happening in the real world about, ‘well am I not also a minority because of X, Y and Z’, and these sort of narratives and things going around. So I think that’s why I did it. I thought it’d be interesting. I think honestly, it is the sort of decision that Nami would make because ultimately, even though she is an angry young person, she doesn’t want to hurt people, she doesn’t actually want to murder everyone just because she thinks the humans are wrong, and ultimately she would do something to save them. Even if she has been led down some difficult paths, her heart’s still there. And that’s all she could think of, I guess, in that split moment. So we’ll see how that ends up in book two.

Charlie: Not that I wasn’t looking forward to it already, but I’m particularly looking forward to Tideborn now. So much that’s potentially going to happen. It’s going to be interesting to see where you take it. But it’s out early next year.

Eliza: Yes.

Charlie: What can you tell us about the story at this point?

Eliza: Ooh, this is the first time I’ve actually had to pitch Tideborn. Yeah, so Tideborn is the end of the story because it’s just a duology and it’s basically, yeah, what happens in the aftermath of Fathomfolk now that humans have gills – just because they all look more similar, actually it’s not enough to heal the rifts. So Mira goes harder into politics and all of the different splinter groups that come around. Nami goes off on the search for the other titan that answered the call. And Cordelia builds an empire. But if I could describe it, I have three words, so it’s going to be ‘grief, growth and motherhood’ would be the way I would describe book two.

Charlie: Fascinating choice of words. Okay. Yeah, no, it’s going to be very, very exciting. I’m also going to have to ask, can you tell us about your hopping vampires book if you are still writing it?

Eliza: Yes. So the hopping vampires book was just announced by Orbit a couple of weeks ago – Harbour of Hungry Ghosts. If I finish writing it on time, it should be out in 2026. The short, pithy pitch, is Babel meets The Witcher, which is very nice. [Charlie says ‘wow, okay! And Eliza uh hums.] My longer pitch is Chinese Buffy The Vampire Slayer in mid-Opium War era Hong Kong – so that’s mid-19th century Hong Kong – who realises there’s a bunch of foreign monsters that are coming in and she doesn’t know why and she has to deal with them. So it’s hopefully more actiony – monsters, ghosts, vampires, but also colonialism. Hooray! [Laughs.]

Charlie: Yeah. Wow. Okay. Yeah, I’m here for that one, definitely. That sounds really, really interesting. I’m gonna end on something to do with Fathomfolk that may well end up in Tideborn, who knows? You know, I don’t [Eliza: okay] It’s very small, but the Game of Wulan? I think, I believe, it’s a tabletop game. Can you tell us about that? I believe you’re a tabletop player yourself, so I’m wondering if there’s some inspiration there.

Eliza: Do they play Wulan or a different game?… they play a couple of other, like, card games, board games in book two. I basically wanted an Easter egg to all the tabletop gamers out there. I based it off…I found a real ancient game from Korea called something similar. I think it was ‘wun long’ or something similar, but I tweaked it because I actually didn’t know the rules of this ancient Korean game. So I just sort of went something like that. But it was just there for me to go, tabletop gamers, have your moment!’

Charlie: Well, I’m not one myself necessarily, but I know people who are, so I got it as well. It was cool. Yeah. All right. Okay. Well, Eliza, this has been lovely. Thank you for coming and talking about the book. It is lovely to have read your book, got so much out of it anyway, and then get so much out of it again by you coming here. Yeah, thank you for being here.

Eliza: Thank you very much for having me on.

[Recorded later] Charlie: I do hope you enjoyed this episode. Do join me next time. And if you have a moment to spare, please do leave a rating and/or review of this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Podcast Addict. Thank you! The Worm Hole Podcast, episode 112 was recorded on 14th August and published on 23rd December 2024. Music and production by Charlie Place.

Photo credit: Sandi Hodkinson

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