![]() ![]() “This was the first project where I’ve really had to do this level of world-building,” Smith says, “and so that was something that really took me a while to figure out, because the immediate question is, if dragons are attacking your city, why would you stay?” ![]() ![]() In a nod to modern anxieties about the gap between rich and poor, Empire Island is a hallucinatory landscape populated either by the very poor, who have no means of escape, or the very rich, who can’t bear to abandon their ancestral estates. So I definitely wanted to join together these disparate fictive universes and see what resulted from that.” The first third of the novel is a marriage plot, and I thought a lot about people like Jane Austen. “I was really interested in having the book be joining together these different modules of genre,” Smith says, “so there’s a fantasy element with the dragons, there’s a near-future dystopia element with some of the reality TV stuff and technology, there’s a gothic romance in what ends up unfolding in Swanny’s story. ![]() The Sky Is Yours recalls the surreal weirdness of Jeff VanderMeer‘s City of Saints and Madmen or China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station, but the oddball intensity of its kaleidoscopic plot gives the novel a distinctive flavor all its own. ![]()
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