SL Huang is joining us today with her novel Half Life. Here’s the publisher’s description.
Cas Russell is back — and so is her deadly supermath.Cas may be an antisocial mercenary who uses her instant calculating skills to mow down enemies, but she’s trying hard to build up a handful of morals. So when she’s hired by an anguished father to rescue his kid from an evil tech conglomerate, it seems like the perfect job to use for ethics practice.Then she finds her client’s daughter . . . who is a robot.The researchers who own the ’bot will stop at nothing to get it back, but the kid’s just real enough for Cas to want to protect her — even though she knows she’s risking everything for a collection of metal and wires. But when the case blows up in her face, it plunges Cas into the crossfire of a massive, decades-long corporate espionage war.Cas knows logically that she isn’t saving a child. She’s stealing a piece of technology, one expensive and high-stakes enough that spiriting it away is going to get innocent people killed. But she has a distraught father on one hand and a robot programmed to act like a distraught daughter on the other, and she’s never been able to sit by when a kid is in trouble — even a fake one.Screw morals and ethics. All Cas wants to do is save one little girl.
“Hey, I just came from rehearsal, so I’m going to grab a quick shower while I’m here,” Miri said. She turned to me. “Cas, right? Make yourself at home, but do me a favor and don’t choke out my cats.”
“I’m really sorry about that,” said Checker. “Cas is…well…” He gave up. “Are you okay?”
Miri winked at him over her shoulder as she disappeared into the hallway. “Fine. My girlfriend’s given me worse.”
“Too much information!” Checker yelled after her.
She’s pretty much my favorite character ever. Why? Because she’s basically me.
I mean, not REALLY — she’s not at all a math nerd, for one. And if I tried to keep as many plants as she does I’d end up with a forest of dead things in my apartment, which is only fun if you’re into that sort of thing. But she’s a queer Asian woman who makes her living in the performing arts and is strangely unperturbed by the weirdness showing up in her life, and every time she pops up on the page I get that happy little flutter of relating to a character a little too well.
Which solves a nice little problem for me! Namely:
Since book 1 of this series came out, a somewhat frightening number of people who know me as a person have told me they think of Cas as being based on me. To which I can only say:
“Holy moly, what do you all THINK of me?!”
I mean, we’re talking about CAS, my superpowered mathematician protagonist with no social skills and severe issues with her moral compass. Cas, who only cares about money and will draw a gun on you as carelessly as she’ll bloody you up. Some friends have even said that they imagine her looking like me, despite the fact that her described appearance is totally different!
I am going to make a public statement, right now, the absolute truth: I honestly do not go around shooting people and punching them in the face all the time. I really, sincerely do not.
I SWEAR.
And hey, being more serious for a second, maybe that’s part of the danger of being an ethnic woman writing a (different) ethnic woman as a protagonist — and oh, all right, a protagonist who also likes math and guns, I’ll give ’em that. Fine, I guess I see why people want to imagine me as Cas. But the comparison is still slightly horrifying, given that she’s a violent mercenary antihero who shoots first and asks questions later, and I’m . . . not.
Not to mention that Cas can be an exceptionally rude person. Really, she’s an asshole. It’s an effort to write her dialogue much of the time because I have to work to make make her more curt and mean and growly.
*makes more shifty eyes at my friends*
Miri, on the other hand . . . Miri is lovely and easygoing and witty. She’s joyous and talented and a loyal friend and doesn’t bat an eye when the protagonists take over her apartment to hide from the Mafia and the Feds —
Okay, fine, Miri’s much cooler than I ever will be. Miri’s as awesome as I WISH I were!
I quite love her.
And now when people ask if Cas is based on me, I can point to Miri instead. And I can say, “What?! No! Cas is not me. I do not kill people! You know who is me? Her. THE QUEER ASIAN WOMAN PERFORMER PERSON WHO SNARKS AT THE PROTAGONISTS AND LIKES CATS. THAT’S ME.”
In all honesty, Miri probably has no more aspects of my personality in her than some of the other characters who fold facets of me-ness into them — Checker, for instance, who gets to make about 9,823,427 nerd references in this book, or (terrifyingly) the antagonist of Half Life, whom I tried to write as if he was the corrupted funhouse mirror of someone with my background, if that person were both way more evil than me and way less lazy. But Miri’s existence makes me happy in the same way she’d make me happy if another author wrote her, because she’s someone I delight in relating to.
I hope you all enjoy her just as much as I do.
LINKS:
BIO:
SL Huang justifies her MIT degree by using it to write eccentric mathematical superhero fiction, starting with her debut novel, Zero Sum Game. In real life, you can usually find her hanging upside down from the ceiling or stabbing people with swords. Online, she’s unhealthily opinionated at www.slhuang.com or on Twitter as @sl_huang.
Good interview! I love reading interviews of my favorite authors and increasing my understanding of the books and the author’s motivations. Admittedly, there were a few surprises for me here. I am glad you don’t go around shooting people, SL, but stabbing them with swords?