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On April 11, Powell’s at Cedar Hills Crossing hosted a launch event for two modern-day masters of speculative fiction: Kate Elliott and Fonda Lee. One is an Oregonian of the past, the other an Oregonian of the present. Both were presenting new releases from Tor, one of the biggest names in sci-fi and fantasy publishing.
Born in Calgary, Alberta, Lee now lives in Portland. Before turning to writing, she took up martial arts and earned a Stanford MBA. She debuted in 2015 with the YA sci-fi novel Zeroboxer, but really made her name from 2017 through 2021 with the Green Bone Saga, a fantasy trilogy with elements of crime drama and family drama. (Picture The Godfather, but set in an East Asian-inspired island city where organized crime families use magically enhanced jade to grapple for dominance.) After completing that trilogy, Lee has turned her attention to smaller projects, including her new fantasy novella, Untethered Sky.
Born in Des Moines, Iowa, raised in Junction City, Ore., and currently living in Hawaii, Elliott has also lived and worked in California, Mexico, and England. She published her debut novel, The Labyrinth Gate, in 1988 as Alis A. Rasmussen; the Kate Elliott pseudonym first appeared in 1992 on Jaran, the first book of one of many fantasy series she has published in the years since.
Elliott has largely flown under the radar (no one novel of hers has more than 10,000 ratings on Goodreads), but she has remained both prolific and acclaimed. Her latest novel, Furious Heaven, is the second book of the Sun Chronicles sci-fi trilogy, which was inspired by an idea of a feminine spin on Alexander the Great and began in 2020 with Unconquerable Sun.
At Powell’s, Lee and Elliott had a spirited conversation about their craft and inspirations. Lee’s Untethered Sky evokes pre-Islamic Persia as it follows Ester, a young rukher (roc rider) learning to fly massive, birdlike rocs in battle against manticores to avenge the death of her family. Professional falconers beta-read Lee’s manuscript, and an animal care professional in the audience praised Lee for her attention to detail regarding the care of the rocs.
Elliott’s background includes growing up with a history teacher father. As she worked on Unconquerable Sun, she found that Alexander the Great was better known through fantastically embellished Roman and medieval histories than through lost primary sources.
The memoirs of Ptolemy I, Alexander’s successor, especially influenced the Roman histories, and Elliott translated that style into the character of “the wily Persephone.” Elliott wrote Persephone in first person, and Sun in third person, because she “didn’t get that Alexander character” as intimately. But still, with the stories of Alexander’s life and his generals fighting to succeed him for decades after his death, she thought to herself, hey, I could write that in space!
The authors also discussed cultural representation in their works. Lee, being Asian herself, had cultural touchstones well in mind while writing the Green Bone Saga. Elliott, who is Caucasian, took inspiration from China and the Philippines for Unconquerable Sun’s imperial rivals of Chaonia and Phene. She consulted Asian readers, including author and translator Ken Liu, to ensure accurate depictions of cuisine, linguistics and philosophy as opposed to surface-level “flavortext.” As an example of the latter, Lee cited Joss Whedon’s cult classic TV series Firefly, in which Asian representation (in a purported East meets West future) is largely limited to Western actors cursing in (often) mangled Mandarin.
For the future, Lee has several projects. She’s written 60,000 words so far on her “cyberpunk samurai” space opera, The Last Contract of Isako, and has a YA fantasy under contract. Elliott, meanwhile, is working on the final Sun novel, Lady Chaos.
Asked what she would write outside of SFF, Lee said she has a sci-fi horror idea “percolating—do not tell my editor!”