Kameron Hurley is joining us today with her novel The Stars are Legion. Here’s the publisher’s description:
Somewhere on the outer rim of the universe, a mass of decaying world-ships known as the Legion is traveling in the seams between the stars. For generations, a war for control of the Legion has been waged, with no clear resolution. As worlds continue to die, a desperate plan is put into motion.
Zan wakes with no memory, prisoner of a people who say they are her family. She is told she is their salvation – the only person capable of boarding the Mokshi, a world-ship with the power to leave the Legion. But Zan’s new family is not the only one desperate to gain control of the prized ship. Zan finds that she must choose sides in a genocidal campaign that will take her from the edges of the Legion’s gravity well to the very belly of the world.
Zan will soon learn that she carries the seeds of the Legion’s destruction – and its possible salvation. But can she and her ragtag band of followers survive the horrors of the Legion and its people long enough to deliver it?
In the tradition of The Fall of Hyperion and Dune, The Stars are Legion is an epic and thrilling tale about tragic love, revenge, and war as imagined by one of the genre’s most celebrated new writers.
What’s Kameron’s favorite bit?
KAMERON HURLEY
I’ve always been a sucker for old-school science fiction “sense of wonder” stories. I love both Golden Age and New Wave science fiction that throws caution to the wind and takes you to gooey, gory, wondrous, mad, incredible new places tucked into the furthest corners of the universe. I love science fiction that is so imaginatively far in the future that it swings back around to fantasy again. The future I’m living is certainly fantastic to someone a thousand years ago. I better be similarly wowed when reading about a world set a thousand years in the future.
In my space opera, The Stars are Legion, I created a legion full of organic starships as large as worlds that lived and reproduced. I envisioned them as great creatures, and the humans inside of them – with their petty wars and civil strife and personal betrayals and love affairs and politics – were simply one part of a larger ecosystem, battling it out there the same way we do here. They are as blinded to their original purpose as humanity is here on earth, scrounging about seeking purpose while we cruise through the universe on our own world ship.
For me, the most exciting part of writing this epic standalone novel was writing the middle section, when everything we know about the worldships flips upside down, and we get to the gory and glorious part where we find out what’s been living beneath its skin. My agent initially wanted the opening to be longer. She wanted more politics from the families on the surface of the world. But for me, all that existed primarily so I could explore what was happening beneath those levels, and how different societies were battling it out for survival while the ship itself literally rotted around them. How would they survive? What would these cultures be like? And what about the vistas of the rotting ship itself?
Readers so far seem to agree that you get to the middle section of The Stars are Legion, which is when one of our characters finds themselves in the belly of the world, and you either go, “Wow! What the hell is this! It’s AMAZING!” or “What? What the hell is this? This is so weird.” I look forward to finding out how the book works for various readers, and how many get as psyched as I did to explore an organic world on the verge of revolution.
The worldbuilding in many of my novels tends to get a lot of attention. Folks wonder how it is I come up with these wild places. But for me, creating new and different environments, and seeing what parts of us are different and what parts are the same, is intensely satisfying. It’s the wonder of discovery that keeps me writing, and reading. I want to write about places I’ve never seen before, with a wild cast of characters who are both relatable and wholly alien.
I write to discover new worlds. I hope you’ll all come along for the ride.
LINKS:
BIO:
Kameron Hurley is the author of The Stars are Legion and the essay collection The Geek Feminist Revolution, as well as the award-winning God’s War Trilogy and The Worldbreaker Saga. Hurley has won the Hugo Award, Kitschy Award, and Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer. She was also a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Nebula Award, and the Gemmell Morningstar Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Popular Science Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, and many anthologies. Hurley has also written for The Atlantic, Entertainment Weekly, The Village Voice, Bitch Magazine, and Locus Magazine. She posts regularly at KameronHurley.com.
