(Photo by Heather Ainsworth)
With Robert (Bob) Proehl’s new book just published in the UK, we asked him about why schools for gifted students is such a draw for him as a reader and writer.
The result was Hogwarts Was My Safety School, or Welcome to Your Super-Powered Internship, Hope You Survive the Experience.
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Why am I an easy mark for science fiction and fantasy schools for “gifted” kids? Why read about Hogwarts and Roke, the Xavier Academy and Brakebills, Homes for Peculiar and Wayward Children? Why was Umbrella Academy an instant add to my Netflix queue, even as I mourned the cancellation of Deadly Class? What is it about this trope that rings in my ears like a homeroom bell, so loudly I was driven to invent a science fiction school of my own in my novel, The Nobody People?
Part of it comes from having attended dull, drab American schools. My high school had all the architectural flourishes of a small prison and was never once attacked by werewolves or blown up by supervillains. The state college I attended was more of the same: squat brick squares spread out over a rural campus, without a single course offering in Psychic Defense or the Ethics of Magic Use in Political Campaigns.
When I was slightly older and visited Ivy League campuses, I recognized that here were the buildings where one studied magic and psychokinesis. I saw dining halls where great feasts might appear on elaborately set long tables, rather than being slopped onto Styrofoam plates from a steamer tray. On a visit to Cambridge, I visited the Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, with its collection of rare tomes and grimoires that all had to be constantly accounted for—if one volume went missing, the entire collection was forfeited to King’s College, by virtue of what can only be understood a centuries-old binding spell. There were schools “more real” than the ones I attended, and the slide to imagining academies of the fantastic was slippery.
If that accounts for my youthful addiction to the genre, there’s still my current obsession and its peculiar evolution to reckon with. As my tastes have progressed from the room-temperature rotgut vodka of my teens to the fancy-but-affordable gins of adulthood, I find myself less interested in fantastic fictional schools than I am in what comes after. Where are the magical internships? The super-powered entry-level jobs? The fictional academies and universities I’ve favored have always been those that sat adjacent to some version of the real world. So what happens when those “gifted” students are tossed out of the nest and land with a dull thud in mundane reality?
This too is easy enough to track to its roots: for many of us, school is the last time anyone treats us as if we are, in some way, special. It’s a time of infinite potential: we study diligently for imaginary future jobs that—quite possibly—no longer exist, or are no longer available to us, or don’t pay a livable wage. We’re regularly affirmed for our work, with grades, with praise, with comments on pieces of writing that, looking back, are insufferable, solipsistic, and unjustifiably self-assured. We graduate under heaps of Latinate praise (cum laude! MAGNA cum laude!) and are are ushered out with speeches from notables assuring us we are bright young things poised to take the world by storm.
In that brief moment, every school is the Xavier Academy, is Hogwarts and Brakebills rolled into one. Commencement ceremonies teem with special individuals about to embark on the astounding adventures that constitute real life.
Certainly some do: mutants and wizards who vault from graduation to promising careers or year-long Instagram-worthy trips of funded self-discovery. I was among the muggles and flatscans who graduated into service jobs and shitty apartments, into a decade of messing about with friends in bars, passionate and ill-advised relationships, recreational drug use and tsking performance reviews from managers (sometimes resulting from messing about in bars and recreational drug use). It was a comedown from that moment I felt special and full of promise, and it followed that even among the graduating classes at institutions of wonder, there’d be those whose reentry into reality was less than the stuff of epics.
It’s one of the life stages I wanted to explore in The Nobody People. Yes, there is a school for gifted youth, and it functions in the myriad ways we imagine such a school would. It’s a home, a refuge, a center of community, and an ongoing touchstone, but ultimately it’s a place to be transcended and left behind. One of my favorite parts of the book, the one that was the most fun to write and that I defended most staunchly in editing as the book’s emotional core, is in its second half, where the older students we’ve followed through their schooling, and across a revolutionary change in the world around them, are spit out into a world that doesn’t care if they’re special. It’s a world of psychic bartenders and literally invisible office temps. Super-powered side hustles and mutant gig economies.
Strangely it’s the least implausible part of the book to me. It’s an homage to that time in our lives where we struggle through, finding our communities and our truest families, where we recognize the preternatural abilities of everyone we go out for drinks with at the end of full shifts of customers and bosses assuring us, incorrectly, that there isn’t a drop of magic in us.
Robert’s new book, The Nobody People is out in the UK now. The SFFWorld review is up tomorrow! Thanks to Robert, and Sarah at Titan Books for help with this one.
