Can you talk a bit about how this story took shape and what inspirations fed into it?

As I’m sure you know, this story was written as part of a Dartmouth University project where speculative fiction authors were paired with Dartmouth faculty and asked to write something inspired by their faculty partner’s research. I was lucky enough to be paired with Jane Henderson, whose work focuses on the concept of “human geography.” My amateur understanding of her research can’t possibly do its depth and complexity justice, but suffice it to say, what I took away from our discussions was the idea of mapping a land not in terms of terrain, but in terms of the humans who dwell upon it—a cultural topography, if you will. Jane’s work in particular focuses on the historical relationship of blackness to the frontier. As a Bengali desi, colonialism is often on my mind, and often features in my work, so that was naturally where my mind went from there.

From the choice to describe Miles’s Scribing as “collecting” stories to his justification of the Scribes as serving Crown and Country, it felt to me less like dropping an anvil and more like you luxuriating in driving the point home, and demonstrating how ignorant Miles is in being out of his league. Were you trying to make things absolutely clear, or widen the range of things the story could be about, or something else entirely?

A bit of column A, a bit of column B! I started out trying to make the nature of Miles’s magic as clear as I possibly could, and quickly realized I’d set myself up for failure, because the entire point of his magic is that it only works because he fundamentally misunderstands how it works (but passionately believes that he’s right). Never let it be said that I make things easy for myself . . .

From there, though, you’re absolutely right that the story is about a lot of things, and possibly about even more. To me, that’s the power of storytelling, and also the richness of folklore. The point of folklore isn’t that it’s true, just as the point of a story isn’t to be correct. Miles is out of his league, and it’s because he can’t let go of the notion that everything can be interrogated, documented, categorized through the framework of his own worldview.

It was a very valid and, to my mind, completely understandable choice to code the Verden as British, from Miles’s name to the way he speaks. Beyond making the story more applicable as a window into history, what led you toward this choice?

As I said, I’m Indian—from Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), in fact, so anyone remotely familiar with that city’s history will not be surprised to know that the cultural memory of the Raj is never very far from my mind. The Verden read as British because those are the signifiers I naturally reach for, given my own background, but also because the image of the British colonizer has very much become the quintessential colonizer in our modern imagination. This story was a bit overambitious in its concept; it could very easily have been a novella, but I didn’t have enough time to make it one, even if Dartmouth had been willing. In the interests of keeping it as short as possible, it was helpful to reach for recognizable—even, dare I say, stereotypical—colonial shorthand that everyone would recognize.

The British analogy also lent itself very well to another theme I wanted to work into this story, which is that of academia as an agent of colonization. I grew up in a city whose modern educational system was heavily shaped by the Raj but also has an ancient intellectual tradition of scholarship and learning that predates British rule by millennia. I have complicated feelings about my own relationship with the English language, which is in some ways more my first language than my actual mother tongue, Bengali, and that’s all to do with how I was raised and what my parents thought would give me an advantage in life. These feelings have only grown more complicated after earning two graduate degrees, one of them in the USA, and anyone who’s familiar with my earlier work (particularly “Ten Excerpts From An Annotated Bibliography On The Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island,” which was published in Nightmare) will know I like to dwell on the inherent racism and colonialism of Western academia, and to try and subvert academic forms (an annotated bibliography in that story, and Miles’s would-be ethnography in this one).

While reading this story, I saw it as being about a great many things—the need to resist the modern crop of tech bros, who use the same “can’t halt progress” argument as Miles, and the damage that can come from linguistic prescriptivism over descriptivism, to name two. As the writer, what do you think it needs to be about?

Needs is a funny word. In many ways, I feel like I’d be falling into the same trap as Miles if I tried to lay down some kind of iron-clad verdict on what this story means, or what it’s about. To be perfectly honest, a good deal of what it’s about is simply that I wanted an excuse to write some fun folktales in the vein of the ones I grew up with! It’s also about the power of language, and how translation is such a fraught process (I speak four languages and edit texts translated from Japanese to English as part of my day job, so this is something I think about often), because you can’t just take something in one language and put it into another language without altering it in the process. Finally, I love coming up with systems of magic and have been wanting for a while to try to invent something that was rooted in the use of language.

Let me put it this way—if this story’s about anything, it’s about the fact that storytelling is, in my opinion, the closest thing to actual magic that we know. And that power does not have a moral valence—it can be used for good, but also for ill.

Is there anything you’re working on that you’d like to talk about? What can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?

Several! I have a debut novel coming out in November—it’s called Children of Empire, and it’s a tie-in novel for Critical Role’s second campaign, The Mighty Nein! You can preorder it now where all good books are found—though I recommend the Astoria Bookshop in Queens, my wonderful queer-owned neighborhood indie that’s a force for good in the community.

I also have a couple more IP projects in the works that I’m very excited to reveal eventually but can’t say more about just yet! Hopefully, you’ll hear more on that front soon.