Foz Meadows’s books include An Accident of Stars and its forthcoming sequel, A Tyranny of Queens. From her interview with Joel Cunningham (and Keith Yatsuhashi) at the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy blog:It seems like both of you are dealing with traditional fantasy tropes in real ways: urban fantasy and portal fantasy. Were you trying intentionally to subvert them?--Marshal Zeringue
Keith: I wasn’t. I fly by the seat of my pants, and it just sort of happened organically.
Foz: So, I have wanted for years to write about someone who goes from our world to another world. As a teenager, it was kind of an escapist fantasy, but I could never get it off the ground. It took an adult look at portal fantasy books, and going, ok, they’re a traditionally safe genre for the protagonist. You’ve got the Pevensies going to Narnia, and they come back, and time has folded up and they’re children again. Dorothy comes back from Oz, and Alice comes back from Wonderland. The thing that always frustrated me as a kid was the denial of consequence. All of these wonderful things they’d learned and done and experienced were held not to have mattered somehow, because the adventure has folded up.
On the other hand, there was a movie in the ’80s called Return to Oz, and it begins with Dorothy being institutionalized, because she’s been talking about what happened in Oz. And it’s this terrifying scene of her being locked up and having to escape, and I loved that, because it felt like, “ok, there is a consequence to this.” So I just wanted to write what I keep calling “an epic portal fantasy with the safeties off.” She’s not magically suspended in time, she’s aware that...[read on]