Exclusive Interview: “Rakesfall” Author Vajra Chandrasekera

 

Some writers embrace the genre in which their story fits. Others deny genre like it’s a prison from which they cannot escape.

But in the following email interview with author Vajra Chandrasekera about his science fiction novel Rakesfall (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook) — in which we also discuss the new paperback edition of his urban fantasy novel, The Saint Of Bright Doors — he says the latter, “…wears the skin of an epic fantasy story in much the same way that Rakesfall wears the skin of a science fiction story.”

To begin what is Rakesfall about, and when and where is it set?

I’m going to borrow the excellent description from Erin Niderberger’s starred review from Library Journal: “Leveret and Annelid star in a television show with a bloody finale; Vidyucchika is stalked by the corpse of the boy she betrayed; Viramunda hunts down her betrayer on a sun-scorched Earth. This novel is a sweeping slipstream epic that follows two intertwined personalities as they recur in new guises through time, moving from the mythic past to modern Sri Lanka to a far-future Earth abandoned by humanity. One of them always dies, but is there an escape from the cycle — and should they take it if there is?”

Erin makes it sound like Rakesfall is a science fiction story….

Rakesfall is science fiction for people who like their science fiction slippery and worryingly over-extended, like a very long worm that you’re pulling out of a hat, and you keep pulling and pulling but somehow there’s always more worm.

Where did you get the idea for Rakesfall?

I was thinking about death and time. As one does. In many ways Rakesfall is the book I wrote in response to my first novel, The Saint Of Bright Doors.

Speaking of which, are there any writers, or specific stories, that had a big influence on Rakesfall but not on The Saint Of Bright Doors? Or anything else you’ve written?

It’s always hard to trace that sort of thing directly, but looking back at what I was reading just before I started working on Rakesfall, a possible answer is Renee Gladman’s The Event Factory and Perumal Murugan’s Poonachi: Or the Story Of A Black Goat, translated by N. Kalyan Raman. And having said that, it actually makes a lot of sense.

How about such non-literary influences as movies, TV shows, or games? Did any of those things have a big influence on Rakesfall?

I do watch a lot of telly. Rakesfall‘s first chapter is even about a TV show, a mysterious documentary that we may or may not be inside.

The pandemic year I wrote Rakesfall was also my year of catching up with a lot of incredible movies that I had been meaning to watch for years, but had never got around to. So around that time I watched Blue Velvet, Possession, and Tarkovsky’s Mirror, all for the first time, all of which did very strange things to my brain. I watched The Lighthouse and loved it. I rewatched Chungking Express halfway through writing this book. I also watched most of Psycho-Pass around that time, and a bunch of old Jackie Chan movies, like Fearless Hyena. Whether any or all of that showed up in the book is uncertain, but this is what was sloshing around in my brain.

Sci-fi stories are sometimes stand-alone stories and sometimes they’re part of larger sagas. What is Rakesfall? Is it a stand-alone story or the first book in a series?

Rakesfall is a stand-alone story, as are all my novels for the foreseeable future. But there are some connections between my novels, which are left as gifts for the reader. I always enjoy that sort of thing when I find them in the work of other authors, and I wanted to do the same for my readers.

Speaking of your novels being connected, your first one, The Saint Of Bright Doors, was just released in paperback. What is Doors about, and when and where is it set?

This is the five-second impression from a quick glance as you pass the bookshelf: it looks like a secondary-world fantasy about a young man who is the son of two magically overbearing parents and has been shaped into a weapon in the ancient war between them, which has already caused massive causal disruption to the timeline and is about to lead to violent upheaval in his city.

It sounds like The Saint Of Bright Doors is an epic fantasy story.

It wears the skin of an epic fantasy story in much the same way that Rakesfall wears the skin of a science fiction story. I would describe both of them as investigations into this trade in pelts, and the art of skinning itself.

Going back to Rakesfall, earlier I asked if it had been influenced by any movies, TV shows, or games. But to flip things around, do you think Rakesfall could be adapted into some movies, a show, or a game?

Given that TV is one of the book’s own many fascinations, it would have to be a TV show.

Of all things, the show that popped into my head is technically a Marvel superhero show: FX’s Legion from 2017. It was so very unlike everything else on TV in its intense desire to play with aesthetic, genre, format, and time, while still having a singular longform story to tell and clear themes to explore. It was a kind of intense psychological drama that would frequently feature trippy psychedelic bits, musical numbers, animated sequences, nonlinear transitions, and a shaky, unreliable sense of reality. Lots of long-running TV shows have the occasional odd episode, but Legion was a show that was made entirely out of those oddities and didn’t have any normal episodes at all. It was a beautiful thing, I don’t know how it ever got made.

And if someone — like, say, Legion creator Noah Hawley — wanted to adapt Rakesfall into a show, who would you want them to cast as Annelid, Leveret, and the other main characters?

I’ve never tried to fancast my own work before, I’m going to be so bad at it.

I want to say Radhika Apte channeling the nervous, demonic energy she brought to Ghoul as Annelid. [Never Have I Ever‘s] Maitreyi Ramakrishnan playing against type and never smiling even one time as a frenetic, hallucinating Vidyucchika. Tabu [Virasat] as the world-weary, spear-wielding Viramunda. A Magicians-era Arjun Gupta is who Leveret needs. I liked Ritesh Rajan in Russian Doll; it wasn’t even a main role and he was still very memorable: he would make a great undead Lambakanna in the walls and ceiling crawlspaces. [Pelli Choopulu‘s] Vijay Deverakonda as the fast-talking Vidyujjihva. And finally, Nimra Bucha [Manto] and Ritu Arya [The Umbrella Academy] in truly ridiculous amounts of creature makeup as Heron and the Lamb. Actually, just skip the creature makeup and let them act. Do the whole thing as a no-budget stage play.

So, is there anything else you think people need to know about Rakesfall? Or The Saint of Bright Doors, for that matter.

They are admittedly weird books. For this reason they are difficult to describe; I swear it’s not just me saying that as a copout, it’s a common refrain in many of the reviews, too. But the reviews also often say that a reader who’s up to handling something unusual will enjoy these books, and I certainly hope so. I would say read a few paragraphs and see if it sparks off anything in your brain! Here’s an excerpt from The Saint of Bright Doors, and you can read the opening of Rakesfall, too: it was originally published as the short story “Peristalsis” in The Deadlands.

Finally, if someone enjoys Rakesfall, what sci-fi novel of someone else’s would you suggest they read, and why?

Of this year’s books, you absolutely have to read Premee Mohamed’s The Siege Of Burning Grass and Kerstin Hall’s Asunder as soon as you can get your hands on them.