Interview with Benjanun Sriduangkaew

We are joined by Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Campbell- and BSFA-nominated author of many postcolonial cyberpunk and South-East Asian fantasy short stories (among which “Courtship in the Country of Machine-Gods,” “Vector,” “We Are All Wasteland on the Inside” and “Mermaid Teeth, Witch-Honed” in TFF publications), who is celebrating the release of her new novella, Winterglass from Apex Publications.

Benjanun Sriduangkaew writes love letters to strange cities, beautiful bugs, and the future. Her work has appeared on Tor.com, in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, and year's best collections. She has been shortlisted for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her debut novella Scale-Bright has been nominated for the British SF Association Award.

She agreed to answer a few of our questions (after the Winterglass blurb below):

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The city-state Sirapirat once knew only warmth and monsoon. When the Winter Queen conquered it, she remade the land in her image, turning Sirapirat into a country of snow and unending frost. But an empire is not her only goal. In secret, she seeks the fragments of a mirror whose power will grant her deepest desire.

At her right hand is General Lussadh, who bears a mirror shard in her heart, as loyal to winter as she is plagued by her past as a traitor to her country. Tasked with locating other glass-bearers, she finds one in Nuawa, an insurgent who’s forged herself into a weapon that will strike down the queen.

To earn her place in the queen’s army, Nuawa must enter a deadly tournament where the losers’ souls are given in service to winter. To free Sirapirat, she is prepared to make sacrifices: those she loves, herself, and the complicated bond slowly forming between her and Lussadh.

If the splinter of glass in Nuawa's heart doesn't destroy her first.

“A fairy tale, beautiful like an ice crystal, and razor sharp.”
SILVIA MORENO-GARCIA, WORLD FANTASY AWARD-WINNING CO-EDITOR OF SHE WALKS IN SHADOWS

“Winterglass is rich with diamondine prose, a scintillant retelling of the Ice Queen that challenges Occidental aesthetics, colonial mentality, and personal identity.”
CASSANDRA KHAW, AUTHOR OF HAMMERS ON BONE, BFA & LOCUS AWARD NOMINEE

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The Future Fire: Winterglass isn’t the first subverted fairy tale retelling that you have written. What is it about this genre that appeals to you?

Lusadh, illustrated by Mumi

Benjanun Sriduangkaew: The obvious one for me is to queer it all up: most fairytales and mythological stories are depressingly heteronormative, even ones that purport to center a woman rescuing a boy are stuck in this quagmire (since when are boys worth risking your life for? Exactly). My hope is that by retelling and reconfiguring these stories there's something we can reclaim for ourselves and for our places in the world. Stories are a powerful thing, the human subconscious looks for narrative patterns. I like to think that by engaging with stories with origins in our cultural bedrock we can reconfigure our minds a little, shift our default assumptions of what love stories are supposed to be like, of who gets to have power and who gets to speak.

TFF: Do you have any plans to collect your fairy tale stories into a single project of some kind?

BS: At first I thought I hadn't written that many, but as it turns out—aside from full-length novellas like Scale-Bright and Winterglass (which are too thematically different)—I have actually written a fair number of stories that fit the bill. 'Paya-Nak' is a lesbian take on a Thai folktake, 'Mermaid Teeth, Witch-Honed' [in TFF-X, ed.] is a Lovecraftian lesbian retelling of The Little Mermaid, 'The Beast at the End of Time' is a post-singularity lesbian Beauty and the Beast, and so on. At the moment there is probably not quite enough volume, but it's very much a possibility to put them together into a mini-collection (plus a new story or two), and I expect there would be interest. It will have to wait a while, as I'll have a collaboration out next year, Methods Devour Themselves (Zero Books), that's partly a mini-collection.

TFF: Why did you choose a tale from the European tradition to talk, among other things, about colonialism and cultural assimilation?

BS: Andersen lived in a culturally homogeneous region, and his entire body of work is culturally/racially homogeneous. His fairytales, like many western fairytales and European narratives, are part and parcel with cultural imperialism. It seems as apt as any to regard his fairytales as a symbol of that hegemony. ‘The Snow Queen’ in particular struck me as a useful allegory—not because the original put in any such work or even pauses to think about it (Andersen was no doubt about as familiar with post-colonialism as he was with having a fulfilled romantic life, which is to say not at all), but because the idea of imposing an unfamiliar climate is essentially what colonization is. It changes ways of life, makes the colonizer's technology seem suddenly 'necessary', and demands total submission into the new order. Having said that, the colonizer in Winterglass—the Winter Queen—is neither white nor European.

TFF: Is there a particular pleasure in remodelling stories that have been told and retold for centuries and yet being able to use them to say something completely new?

BS: Yes! Structurally Winterglass has very little in common with the Andersen story, and eschews the bildungsroman entirely (Gerda and Kay are children; Nuawa and Lussadh are respectively in their thirties and forties). What I was interested in doing wasn't a literal retelling so much as referential, so I treated ‘The Snow Queen’ as material to mine rather than a framework to replicate.

While I don't think I'm saying something entirely new I do find that most retellings—being by white authors—more interested in the gender politics of fairytales (usually the agency and role and activity of female characters; somewhat more rarely, in queering up the stories) or in grimdarking it all up (by emphasizing or adding, sometimes to excess, the violence and sexual assault). The questions of empire and culture come up somewhat less. Either way I like to think that I'm bringing something to the table that, say, Disney very much hasn't.

TFF: As a reader/viewer, do you enjoy retellings of classic stories? Is there one that taught you something you found useful in your own writing of Winterglass?

BS: Joan D. Vinge's The Snow Queen was very interesting for its time, even if on reread now it doesn't hold up, partly because it depicts an improbable white-guilt fantasy: here's a planet inhabited entirely by white pagans, here's a bunch of brown people who colonized and exploited them. Unfortunate implications, as they say. I don't think it necessarily taught me a concrete lesson, but it does show that you can really put a fairytale in unexpected settings, clones and supercomputers and all.

TFF: Why do you think mirrors make such good symbols of our deepest desires?

BS: Reflection is potent, and reflection that can distort—such as in concave or convex glass—unnerves. There's a reason doppelgangers are creepy, because it can be either a very harsh teller of truth or a version of you that's not quite right, and sometimes it can be both. Mirrors can represent so much dream logic, the subconscious, suggesting that what it brings out can be something about ourselves we don't even know (or want to know). And physically glass is an attractive material, it does interesting, intriguing things with light. There's a lot of room for metaphor there.

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Thank you so much for talking to us about Winterglass, Benjanun. I look forward to reading it!

Fairytales Told Twice

Fairytales Told Twice, and the Idylls of the King

Guest post by Benjanun Sriduangkaew

When working on Winterglass, I wanted to thoroughly remove it from its milieu (white, Christian, Finnish, heteronormative). One of my inspirations for that relocation of culture and narrative? It came by a very odd, sideways manner — through Nasu Kinoko.

In Nasu’s extensive (famous or notorious, depending on your perspective) Fate/stay night franchise, King Arthur is a bisexual woman.

From left to right: Gawain, Mordred, Lancelot, Artoria, Bedivere, Tristan, Agravain. Yes, Mordred is a woman.

It’s not that she is reincarnated in an American high school as a girl — how wishy-washy — she has always been a woman, though her gender was kept a semi-secret, known mostly to her knights. Her son Mordred in the red armor: also a woman. Sir Gareth, not pictured here: also a woman. It’s not a big change, and gender-flipping in retellings is a common enough trope (though oddly, when it comes to Arthuriana specifically, this seems to be the first of its kind and hasn’t been replicated since). But Nasu also made a number of other changes: in classic Arthuriana, the court at Camelot is celebratory, a place of pageantry and performative gallantry — there are jousts, there are quests for the grail, and King Arthur pulled the sword from the stone without knowing what it meant. In Nasuverse, Artoria pulls the sword knowing exactly what it means, and she grows into a king best known for her perfection, aloof and removed from her people, a monarch without emotion who’s dedicated entirely to her duty. Arthuriana regards the land as owing a duty to its king; King Artoria sees kingship as making her subject to her people—it is she who owes Britain duty, not the other way around.

Artoria contradicts classic Arthuriana for more reasons than just her gender: it is crucial to the King Arthur figure to not know what the sword in the stone means, and for him to have yanked it out in innocence; it is crucial for him, pre-kingship, to be reluctant and naive to the idea of leadership. Him turning out to be the rightful heir and rightful king is supposed to be a surprise to him. Artoria fundamentally differs from her source counterpart in that, not only does she know what the sword means, she is forewarned that kingship is a terrible, lonely burden and that her reign will likely end in tragedy.

Merlin, either in Mallory or de Troyes or The Vulgate Cycle, never quite gives Arthur the same warning.

The battle of Camlann

The Arthuriana of Nasuverse is meticulously researched: Gawain possesses the Belt of Bertilak, a version of Artoria owns and wields the lance Rhongomyniad, a wealth of obscure minutiae from Mallory and the rest are surprisingly included. But what King Artoria does not concern herself with, what this retelling of Arthuriana doesn’t rate in high regard, is England. King Artoria is transported to Avalon to rest until a time of need arises, but it’s not Britain that she comes to aid; she is instead summoned into a duel of mages in contemporary Japan (twice). While Fate/stay night and its various spin-offs occasionally brings the action to England, usually London, Artoria herself is always absent from such outings. She appears in the fictional city of Fuyuki fully acclimated to its culture; she sits on tatami and sleeps on futon; she enjoys Japanese food and (thanks to magic) speaks the language perfectly. Her version of chivalry more closely resembles bushido than the European concept, and she doesn’t distinguish her national identity as a Welsh from the Japanese characters’ understanding that she is simply British. Not once, in her various appearances, does she ask how modern Britain is doing.

In other words, King Artoria — Saber — isn’t all that British beyond surface details; Nasu Kinoko (and the bevy of writers who have joined him over the years) is not that interested in the Matter of Britain. Artoria and her Knights of the Round Table, despite their source material, are not there to tell a British story. Their myths and legends are there, essentially, as window dressing.

This more than anything is what keeps me interested: that a team of writers (ever-expanding) would take a body of legend that is considered quintessentially English and then discards its Englishness entirely. It’s not something that white, western writers do — even limp retellings like Avalon High cleave to British origins, with the protagonists’ parents as professors of Arthuriana studies. Several darker-and-grittier fantasy makes a point of distinguishing the various English/British identities, down to the regional distinction between Caledonian and Saxon and Scottish or what have you, all distinctions that Nasuverse never even thinks about because to Japanese writers, all white Britons are more or less the same, belonging to a single amorphous culture (so much so that Lancelot being French is beside the point, he’s lumped in with the rest of the Round Table). There’s a hundred stories that claim to subvert the story through telling it from the point of view of Mordred, or to make Guinevere a warrior queen or chieftain (this is very popular), or to gritty-it-up by making Arthur and his knights a bunch of hooligans (King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, the 2017 film). There’s a lot of ‘King Arthur was actually a Roman soldier named Artorius’. But no one thinks to make King Arthur a woman, because that goes just a little too far. (Sorry, but Avalon High’s reincarnation deal is too limp for me.)

Lancelot du Lake

This is what interests me: the deep and fundamental difference between a retelling and its source material, especially when the source material belongs to a dominant culture and the retelling does not, especially when the writers of a non-dominant culture mixes, matches, and uses the details of the dominant culture as surface dressing with no regard for what’s underneath — to the extent that the new creation is almost its own independent thing, a second canon, a Japanese Arthuriana.

Nasu Kinoko may have read a translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight but it was probably to mine what skills and powers Gawain would have as a Heroic Spirit. It’s irreverent, not in the satirical slapstick manner of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, but in simple disregard for anything English. This is a media property that mines Arthuriana for plenty of material while entirely decentering Britain and all things associated with it. Nasu’s Arthuriana is culturally removed from its source, and King Arthur is not just a bisexual woman but also an idealist who despises expansionism and colonization.

You couldn’t get any less British than that.