C.A. Higgins has a degree in Physics and she’s not afraid to use it. Entertainment Weekly’s Fall Books Preview called her first book Lightless “[A] riveting sci-fi debut” . Here she talks to SFFWorld about her sequel Supernova.
Tell us about Supernova.
Supernova is the sequel to Lightless, and it follows some of the surviving characters from Lightless, focusing on Constance Harper and Althea Bastet as they try to navigate the chaos spawned from the events of the first novel. Each of the women has created something awe-inspiring—Constance has started a revolution, Althea has created sentient spaceship Ananke—but both find their creations growing out of their control.
What was your initial inspiration for Lightless and how did Supernova grow out of Lightless?
Lightless was initially inspired by a lecture on thermodynamics I attended in college. The professor was talking about particles in a box, and describing how those particles evolve thermodynamically. To help myself gain intuition, I imagined the particles as little people. Lightless rose up out of that—a bunch of characters, isolated, influencing each other the way the particles did.
As I wrote Lightless I found that the book worked best if I kept it hyper-focused on the claustrophobic world of the characters on board the Ananke. But there was a whole world of interesting story happening outside of the ship and after Lightless ended. Supernova tells some of that story from the perspective of a character who’s concealed by a lot of duplicity in Lightless: the Mallt-y-Nos. Then there was the matter of Ananke—how an intelligence that is both alien and very human evolves, especially in reaction to the less than ideal influences she’s been exposed to, was very interesting to me.
What did you draw on for your portrayal of Ananke and Althea’s relationship in Supernova?
My mother will be relieved to hear that the answer is not “my relationship with my mother”.
Ananke is part Althea’s daughter and part her artistic creation. I’m not a mother so I drew more on the latter. I also drew on various horror-movie tropes: Ananke and Althea are dependent on each other and are reflections of each other’s selves, and so when there’s conflict between them it touches on the way the boundaries between “myself” and “the monster” start to blur. Which is creepy, and creepy is fun. Ananke’s always had a lot of horror movie in her.
I’ve read that you referred to the Laws of Thermodynamics to divide up the “acts” in Lightless. It seems as if they would also be an elegant metaphor for the growing civil war in your second book. Would you agree?
Certainly the idea of increasing chaos is an important part of Supernova as well. I used the laws of thermodynamics to structure Lightless because Lightless takes the world it’s set in—and the characters who exist in it—from a state of order into a state of chaos. But Supernova opens in a state of chaos that then grows more intense. Instead of structuring Supernova around the laws of thermodynamics, I built it around the life of a massive star, which has a violent birth and an even more violent end.
What’s your writing process? Do you start at the beginning, middle or end? Do you throw a lot away? Do you write every day? Are you a planner or do you fly by the seat of the pants?
I outline in very great detail, down to individual beats within a scene. Then I write the entire book from beginning to end. Then I’ll reread it, write a new outline, and rewrite the book in order. I’ll do that process over and over again, but each time I’ll (hopefully!) have to rewrite less of the book.
I have another job during the week, so the only time I have to write are the weekends. I give myself one day to lie around the house, go to bars, or play video games, but the other day—usually Sunday—I wake up early, get coffee, and I write until I go to bed.
When is the third book in the series coming out? Can you tell us anything about it? Does it have a title yet?
The third book will come out in spring 2017. It doesn’t have an official title yet—actually, it only got a working title about a month ago. Before that I was calling it “book three” or “the next one” or “that thing that I’m writing right now, you know, where that other thing happens”. Finding the document on my computer was an adventure.
The third book will focus around two characters who are very intimately connected with both the revolution and with the Ananke: Ivan and Mattie.
What 3 artworks (books, music, visual arts, films) have most inspired you?
I just finished playing Dragon Age II a few days ago and I am feeling pretty inspired. In the longer term I would probably say The Lord of the Rings, the Battlestar Galactica reboot, and the Animorphs series. I love the mix of political/social conflict and questions about sentience and humanity in the Battlestar Galactica reboot. The Lord of the Rings was one of my favorite books (and movie series) as a child, and I love the rich world and the powerful friendships between the characters. Animorphs was also one of my favorite series—I loved the aliens, the gruesome transformations, and the ambiguous ending.
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Interview by Jane Routley – SFFWorld.com © 2016
