Suyi Davies Okungbowa is an award-winning author of fantasy and science fiction. His latest books include Lost Ark Dreaming (Ignyte & Nommo award winner; Nebula Award finalist), and the Nameless Republic trilogy (beginning with Son of the Storm and concluding with Season of the Serpent). He lives in Ontario, where he is a professor of creative writing at the University of Ottawa. Find him online at @suyidavies and SuyiAfterFive.com.

Robert: You often write genre fiction, particularly science fiction and fantasy. What is the allure of that kind of genre to you, and what attracts you to keep coming back to it? 

Suyi: You know, I never set out to be a writer of speculative fiction. When I first started writing, I would say if I gravitated toward anything, it would have been stories with a lot of suspense, and I think I still write that; they just tend to be speculative. At that time, it might have been something within the realm of thriller, mystery, maybe. But I think I started gravitating toward speculative work because, with speculation, you take something that would be deemed ordinary—a concept, a character, a concern, or a theme—and then isolate that thing and place it against a sort of contrasting background. So imagine if we’re thinking of some settlement or whatever, we’re taking it out of its natural space, and then we’re saying, what if it was not like that, but like this? And then from that new iteration, we are spreading a new reality. 

R: You get to propagate a kind of different version of the same world. 

S: Exactly. And I think that’s what drives me, because it’s not just the creation of a new reality, it’s the isolation and contrast of it. To take it and render it in high fidelity, so you can almost present it in all its saturation, which allows you to really look at something in a way that can disappear if you’re telling any other kind of story. With speculative work, you can really look at that one thing and make it the centrepiece, so that’s why I keep going back to it, because I always want to do that. 

R: That makes a lot of sense. You want to keep returning to that same idea of expanding and diversifying. That bridges into my next question. My first exposure to your writing was a few years ago, when I read your short story, Lady Koi Koi, which employs a very unique format: a student’s book report. While reading your Lost Ark Dreaming, you employ something similar to the informational, expositional documents layered throughout the text. This pivot into different formatting helps the narrative feel complex and unique. What is the thought process behind including something like that in the story? And before writing, do you know that you’re going to use that as a device, or does it happen organically? 

S: Okay, this is an interesting one. A lengthy answer, too. First thing is, what you’re describing is sometimes called “hermit crabbing,” which is when you find a shape, and then you put the story you want to tell into that shape, which is what I did with Lady Koi Koi. The processes were different for Lost Ark Dreaming and Lady Koi Koi, but I think I do generally gravitate toward and am interested in using other forms or formats to tell stories because they do the same thing that speculation does: they take something that you’re familiar with and then impress an unfamiliar thing upon it, right? So, as you said, with Lady Koi Koi, it’s a book report, which you expect to be something, but it allows us to see something unexpected that’s going on in this character’s life because that thing keeps intruding in the book report. So, do I always know? Not always. With Lady Koi Koi, I knew I was going to tell a story about a boy at a boarding school who was lonely and made friends with a ghost. I knew what form it would be, because what would a lonely kid use to express this intimate experience in a more private way? To someone with some authority?

R: Well, yeah, through a teacher. A book report, written for a teacher.

S: Yes! An assignment. So, I started with the format of a book report, then I started thinking of other things, like headings and how they can work in two ways. 

R: I see that in the book. The way you have done it looks very interesting on the page; your formatting definitely adds to it. 

S: With Lost Ark Dreaming, it was slightly different. I had already written the narrative part, and after finishing it, I wondered how much I wanted to turn away from the straightforward pace of the story. How much am I willing to pause to give other information, as I did? I didn’t want to lose the reader’s energy and focus, so I went with interstitials, and the easiest thing to include was living documents from the time to give quick snapshots and context. All I needed to do was decide what type of documents and who would be speaking in them. 

R: You do it in different ways, too. There is an article, some government documents, and an interview, all with different narrators giving different perspectives. 

S: Yes, and I think the idea was that I wanted to create the sense that there was an archive somewhere that we weren’t privy to, but we got snapshots into. Part of the reason I did that was because we are able to look into archives from the towers, and different kinds of archives, which helps open up the plot. 

R: Creatively, what would you say influences your work the most when going into writing a story? Is it other science fiction and the like, or is it outside of genre fiction? Aside from speculative fiction, what has affected your style the most?

S: I am very chameleonic. I barely ever have a singular influence, but I will say, in terms of character, you are likely to find the ones I write as morally grey, because they tend to be hard to place, can swing any way, and are full of surprises. I like very pacey work, so I am inspired and driven by suspense, tension, thrills—a lot of my work is based around that. I would say I learned a lot from thrillers. I read a lot of thrillers growing up; my parents had stocked a lot of mass-market paperbacks, and many of them were thrillers, and I think they influenced how I write.

I think the morally grey characters are influenced a bit by the fact that I also read a lot of crime novels growing up. The early subset of big fantasy narratives established a clear line between good and evil, like the dark side in Star Wars, but these narratives developed into a messier, anti-hero era, with Game of Thrones and superhero movies and comics, which moved from justice against evil to morally ambiguous. I settled on the angle that I wanted characters that reflect the range of the human condition, which is that we sometimes make mistakes. 

Outside of that, I really like language and am really driven by it. I read a lot of poetry and a lot of literary fiction driven by language. I really find what people think of as “book club” fiction interesting because it does the work of marrying language with very pacey language and narrative, and I really like seeing how that is done. The way I use language is somewhere between poetry and “book club” fiction. Then comes world-building, a lot of which comes from my work as a civil engineer. 

R: I can see that! Especially in Lost Ark Dreaming, with the infrastructural aspects of the towers. Definitely very industrial. 

S: Architectural, urban planning, geography, all that stuff was part of my education, so it became fascinating and something I wanted to implement more. 

R: Whether in Lost Ark Dreaming’s futuristic Lagos or the Fantastic world of Oon in your Nameless Republic trilogy, you have built within your stories a unique sense of setting in Afrocentric locations. How do you feel your work fits in the current Afrocentric Futurisms space, and what do you think this lens brings to the future of science fiction?

S: It depends on where the work is situated. A good example is with the latest story I wrote and submitted for an anthology, which was based on the neighbourhood I live in here, in Ottawa. So, the question becomes: Is it Afrocentric Futurisms because I wrote it? Or, is it Afrocentric Futurisms because of where it’s centred? I started realizing that it’s hard to pin down a writer or their work in a specific spot, and therefore, a spectrum is required. That’s what I think my work does: it forces a spectrum on an idea, and that’s what I think science fiction needs more of; it needs more of a spectrum of things. 

R: Diversifying beyond the parameters. 

S: Exactly, beyond the singular parameter. That way, it brings readership into science fiction. 

R: Right. It diversifies that, too, going forward.

S: Not only does it diversify the stories and the ideas and the authors, but it also diversifies the readership because then nobody says, Oh, I can’t read science fiction, because they don’t see science fiction as a singular thing. Instead, they see a spectrum, where they can read science fiction like this, or fantasy like that. 

R: On a similar note, your Lost Ark Dreaming uses climate change as a basis for its dystopian future, in its high-rise civilization built into towers called ‘Fingers,’ their construction meant to save them from the flooding Earth. How much is the futuristic Lagos in your story connected to the real dangers of climate change? Does your work often interact with cli-fi as well as sci-fi?

S: I mean, I’m always talking about some kind of environmental issues, I think. I find that that’s often the case, like The Nameless Republic has deserts, you know, receding waters, all of these are things I’ve written of. I’ve lived coastwise in Lagos; I grew up in the rainforest area in southern Nigeria. Arid areas, northern Nigeria, and the southwest of the US are in the same conditions: dry and water tables receding, lack of access to water, etc. I’ve found that in each of these spaces, there’s always some sign of environmental degradation, and I’m always thinking about how people respond to that. Some of the responses are political, some are scientific, some are social. It doesn't matter. I think people respond depending on the tools they have in front of them. I’m always writing, so is cli-fi always part of my story? Not always, but whenever I have the opportunity, I try to shine a light on it. 

Lost Ark Dreaming is my most cli-fi driven work, but the reason is that it’s inspired by actual things. It’s an actual island, actual towers, actual erosions of the beach, actual incursion of the waters. In fact, the future I set the novel in, where Lagos is underwater, has already been projected. By about 2050, 2100, the city itself will just be gone. So I’m not making this stuff up, really. And the towers that I have created actually exist. 

R: Really? 

S: Yes. Well, not these towers, not submerged towers. But there are towers right now off the coast of Lagos that are built for the rich. They are Luxury towers, some sort of imitation of the Gulf States, this idea of building a luxury island off the coast. When I moved to Lagos and lived there, I used to drive past them. So, a lot of the things I’ve mentioned, like the workers going into the towers and people working underneath them, I have seen firsthand. Another thing that helped with that was that I’ve worked on an oil rig. Part of my job prior was to fly out to oil rigs and do inventory for the oil that had been drilled. 

R: That would give you a really personal look at this kind of thing, especially the feel for such an industrial structure as you’ve written.

S: Yes, and I was living on rigs, surrounded by water, isolated in the middle of the ocean. So that gives me an experience to write with. I’ve also been on a cruise ship, so I think I’ve already experienced things like being on these rigs, being on a cruise ship, and watching these towers go up. So it was easier for me to then go back to that world while writing. 

R: And just speculate a little bit further, branch a little bit further out, and create something that's not even very far from reality. And actually, I think what helps with that is those documents that you include with it, right? It makes it feel more real, more profitable.

S: Correct. Some of them are even representations of documents that already exist. Like the projections, for instance, the first two documents, one of them is an interview with the person who creates the towers. It’s very similar to the interview for the person who built the current towers. The second one is a report on why the towers are bad for the environment. And it’s literally the exact kind of report I was reading about the current towers. 

R: You have worked in a wide range of media and with big names, making projects for lots of different companies. Writing for Netflix, Minecraft, and Marvel, respectively. What is the difference between writing something for a large studio and a brand, as opposed to writing something for yourself or your own publications? And within that, what are the creative liberties and limitations like?

S: I think writing for yourself just scratches a different kind of creative itch. Writing for yourself is mostly coming up with everything yourself, but writing for a property often means that you have to be in collaboration with someone else, whether that is a team you are actively working with or the creator who made this thing 15 years ago or whatever, right? You’re always sort of in conversation. I think that’s the first part: holding in your head that you’re in conversation with someone else, and that it’s not like you’re writing to a fandom or you’re writing to a canon or whatever. It’s that someone created something, and you’re supposed to create and add to it, and I think I like that part. I like that part of being in conversation. 

And then how much of your voice can you put in yourself? It depends on the property. With Minecraft, for instance, Minecraft itself was really just a framework. They wanted me to do whatever I wanted inside that. But Netflix was the complete opposite. Netflix was like: This is a TV show. Everything is set in stone. You do not have much leeway. Do what we tell you. With Marvel, it’s slightly different because the properties differ. In this case, I wrote for a comic and borrowed from what was already established. So when there were spaces between the issues, Marvel let me do whatever I wanted in that space. So, Marvel is a bit 50/50 depending on what you have. 

With other properties, like Magic: The Gathering, they give you parameters, and they say, Within these parameters go, but outside of these, no. But I do like working for them, mostly because I love the properties themselves already. Like I always tell people, I do it because the world needs them. A good example is the Stranger Things one. I did enjoy the TV show from the start, but I wrote that book specifically because I thought Lucas Sinclair was a character who didn’t get enough work late in the show and felt like this book was a way to help redeem that and also to solve my own frustration about it. 

R: Yeah, because you, as a fan, want more from the show, you want more of that character. 

S: Exactly, yeah, and then I get to do it. Black Panther was very similar. They wanted to adapt a version of the character for novelization, and I wanted to do it myself, so no one else could ruin it. 

R: In your trilogy, The Nameless Republic, you have built an alternate world of fantastic proportions. Within it, you have created and layered mythology, history, and characters of different backgrounds with great depth. How do you establish and balance such a well-rounded world that’s beyond reality? And what is your process like, maintaining that unique world and story building, with plot development, and your characters’ arcs? Moreover, how do you keep those characters still relatable in a world so different from our own?  

S: Good question. I didn’t always know how to do it. It took me a lot of trial and error. This series wasn’t my first book. It was number five or six. And I don’t think I always got it right. You know, I’m still getting better. I think it's two things: one, the characters, and two, the setting or the world. I never think of the world as some isolated thing that I’m building in. As I said, I think the world is just something you take, isolate, and then sort of render, right? But that rendering needs to look something like our lived experience. And every time I have to ask a question about this world, I try to ask the same question about our world. If you were blah, blah, blah, what would you do? And in the same way, if you were in this other world, what would you do?

One of the issues I had when I was starting, and I see now with younger writers, is that the rendering is very limited or flat, very thin. And the question they ask me is, How do you know how much detail to include or not include? And the answer is, well, what would you include in a literary fiction novel? A realist novel? Now think about what you would need for this imagined world. For this scene, answer that question, then include it. Do you have to answer the question for the rest of the world? No, because you don’t have to do that in a realist novel anyway.

R: I suppose that also goes back to your influences for your characters, too. You want to make them feel as human as possible, so you write them that same way, and that’s why they stay relatable even though the world is so different. 

S: Correct—it’s the same answer for the question for the characters. Because if I’m doing this for the place, then I’m doing it for the character. I would say, what would the character in our world be? How would they respond? You know, folks who say, “Oh, I saw a dragon,” and so-and-so is the response, I would ask some questions like, is a dragon regular according to this world? If it is, then I might respond the same way I would see a truck. Or a dog. And if it's a strange occurrence, then I would respond the same way I would if I were, I don’t know, seeing a tsunami. But the character response is the same. So you have to render that response as close as possible to the human condition. And I think if you’re always asking that question honestly every time, based on the nature of the characters, they will always feel real, no matter the world you set them in. And for me, it’s always within those two spaces. I even say, your story doesn’t need to have magic, technology, or power; it really doesn’t matter. In the end, it’s just a work, like any other work. And the characters are just people like any other people. 

R: As an experienced, published writer, as well as a professor, what are your thoughts on how Generative AI might affect the expression of creative writing and, more broadly, what changes do you think it will bring to the publishing world as a whole, as far as getting your work out there? 

S: This is interesting. I have a split opinion on this one. On one hand, I think creativity or creation is never going to go away. It has never gone away. It has always survived the test of time. There have been multiple technologies that have shown up since Shakespeare or whatever, and we’ve still written poems, we’ve still sung songs, we’ve still done everything. We’ve made art. Now, will the way we make the art and the manner of approach to the art change? It might, but I think it’s more that the art takes in the parts of the technology that are useful and just sort of discards the rest. 

At the same time, I think AI specifically has been created as technology that is meant to replace not just the need for the art, but the demand for it, the purpose of it. It wants to replace all these facets of the art-making process: The reason we make art, the outputs of the art, and the kind of art we make. And I think none of the reasons for replacing these things are positive in any long-term world. None of it is good for the human populace as a whole. None of it is good for the individual as an artist. None of it is good for labour. For that reason, I think, predominantly for those who are creating and trying to impress upon the world, it is a destructive technology that needs to be sent into the sun. On one hand, there’s a part of me that’s like, art will persevere. Not that I’m not apprehensive, but I’m like, art will still be there. But then there’s the other part of me reminding myself that none of the people creating these technologies are trying to help us as artists make better art. They’re trying to do these other things. 

Now there’s also the part that AI itself hasn’t necessarily gone through a lot of ethical pathways, and it has a lot of destructive tendencies, including environmental ones. Now, in that way, AI is not very different from many other technologies because many of them still have ethical challenges, and you know, vehicles are a good technology, but they’re still bad for the environment. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t chew gum and walk at the same time. We can criticize AI and understand how destructive it is, but also acknowledge that, likely, there are going to be artists who use it. I’m not going to be one of those artists. I don’t see the need, and I don’t see the reason, but I won’t be shocked if, in twenty years from now, we regularly employ AI. In the end, I think art will persevere, and I’m on the side of art and its perseverance. That’s where I’m going to live for as long as I can make art. 

R: That makes sense. 

As a writer of genre fiction, do you believe it can cohabitate within higher education and the arts? In a space so dominated by capital ‘C’ classics, what do you think genre fiction can bring to a syllabus? And, do you think there has been a push to include it more, or has there been a pushback? 

S: I think there’s way more inclusion of it now than there ever used to be. In fact, I’ll give you an example. I got into my grad school program by submitting a horror story, which never used to happen. And throughout my time as a grad student, I wrote a speculative work. Was it always well-received? Probably not, but neither were other pieces that were not speculative. So I would say it is definitely making its way into the academy as an institution. Now, is it still facing a lot of roadblocks? Yes, but that’s like every other thing. Should there be more to it than academic studies? One hundred percent. Mostly because when the classics were made, they were not seen as they are now. 

R: For sure. I mean, look at what Frankenstein was seen as when it was published. 

S: Exactly. But the other part of that is also the fact that literature (classics) itself is a rendering of the social. Literature is always that. It is a rendering of the social consciousness of its time. So, I think regardless of what it is, the point of the academy is to study, not necessarily to cast value judgments. I’m pretty sure twenty, thirty, fifty years from now, we’re gonna be looking at blog posts that someone wrote or Substack posts—a study of digital literature. The novel as an art form started at a point, and we started studying novels; if they go out of fashion tomorrow and we start studying a different kind of form, that would become the norm. 

R: Your upcoming publication of Season of the Serpent is coming out in August of this year, wrapping up your Nameless Republic trilogy. Could you tell us about the process of writing the final piece of the collection, and what your hopes are for readers to take away from this last issue? And a follow-up, what do you have on the horizon? Can you tell us anything that you’re working on? 

S: Okay, so for Season of the Serpent, finishing it was a bit of a relief, but also exhilarating. I like to call the final book in a series, “landing the plane.” It’s easy to take off, staying in the air may be easy, but landing? That’s hard. And I think that this was the toughest of the three books, but it was also maybe the most enjoyable to write, because I knew the characters in and out. 

R: And, you’re getting to grow with them, right? Learn with them and develop.

S: You know the world, you know the characters, you know what they would do. And the funny thing is, you might actually surprise yourself because you’re like, for sure they would do this, but then you're writing, and you think, oh, but what if they did this instead? One of the things I’ve learned as an author is that if you can surprise yourself, you are one hundred percent sure to surprise the reader. And, I had a lot more opportunities to surprise myself in this book, and that’s why I enjoyed writing it as much as I did. It’s also the shortest of the three, because I already knew what I was going to do very early. I knew who the final players would be. Sometimes, I didn’t know how they would get there, but that was the room for surprise. 

And then the other thing is, because you’ve set up all this other stuff in the first two books, you get to play around with the final book a bit. I made a lot of formal choices, for instance. There’s a section in the book that plays with the point of view a bit, because the other books had to have a lot of structure, but with this one, because the structure is already baked into the series, I could sort of deviate from it for a bit. In fact, I call it my war novel because it discusses war and conflict. I was able to play with the point of view because of how war functions, right? Like if you were looking at a campaign of violence, being able to shift perspective casts it in a different light than a singular one. I was able to do that for a section of the book, the middle section, which is just one very lengthy chapter that shifts point of view, and that includes characters that you have not heard from or like random one-offs that you have not seen, because of the previous structure. One of those characters includes a pigeon who’s sent off to deliver messages. 

R: And the narrative takes the perspective of the pigeon? 

S: Yep. 

R: Oh, that’s very cool. 

S: Yeah, so one army sends a message to the other, but instead of just seeing the armies, it follows the pigeon who’s going to deliver the message, and through it, you see an aerial view of the war. You see the meaninglessness of it. 

R: It’s almost like a spectator, maybe even taking on the reader’s perspective. 

S: Which it does. So, I was able to do stuff like that, which is what I really like about the third book. Now, for my next ad: my next book is a vampire novel. 

So I was funded by the Canada Council to write a vampire novel, and I’m currently writing that now. It’s going to be published either in 2027 or 2028. And I can only call it a vampire novel because it’s not one genre. It has elements of the gothic; it's a bit of a horror, but it’s also fantastic. And it’s on the alt-historical side. I call it an alt-historical because it has all the elements of a historical, but the historical period is imagined. 

It’s set on an island in the middle of the Atlantic, which is representative of various Afrocentric diasporas. So we’re talking from Southern England to Canada, North America, the Caribbean, as well as representations of continental Africans, like Nigeria, where I’m from. It involves a Royal British charter company, which is actually how many African nations were founded. A charter company goes to a place, takes a royal charter, and uses it to carry out its commercial activities. So many of the places that I have just mentioned had these companies, and later the companies expanded to other nations upon independence. So it's about this island’s version of this, but instead of palm oil—which is what the British Royal Niger Company came to Nigeria to get—in this case, they’re looking for vampire blood. So, that’s where the story starts. Then it follows a pair of twins from the island, who are caught up with the arrival of the British on their island when they’re very young, then they get estranged, and after many years, they’re reunited, but they’re on opposite sides. 

R: That sounds awesome. 

S: Yeah? That’s what’s coming up. 

R: Exciting. Well, that’s it for me. Thank you very much.