An Interview with Kameron Hurley, Author, “God’s War”

Kameron Hurley is the author of the new science fiction thriller God’s War, a story featuring a morally flexible assassin, and a gene-stealing alien pirate fighting against the backdrop of a war that has lasted for centuries. She recently spoke with me about the popularity of assassins, bugpunk and why aliens don’t have to have a dozen tentacles or acid blood to be scary.

What can you tell us about God’s War?

God’s War is a bloody little SF romp on a far-future world engaged in perpetual war. Nyx is a former government assassin who makes a living cutting off heads for cash. But when a dubious deal between her government and an alien gene pirate goes bad, Nyx’s ugly past makes her the top pick for a covert recovery. The head they want her to bring home could end the war–but at what price? Her world is about to find out.

So what’s bugpunk, exactly? We’ve got several punk-suffix genres already: steam, bio and diesel, just to name a few. How does bugpunk related to these? How is it different?

Slapping “punk” on the end of something – cyberpunk, steampunk – always put me in mind of a reimagining of technology. In God’s War, that’s what I did – reimagined the way people powered engines, mended wounds, created vehicles, produced weapons. Bugpunk refers to the core technology at the heart of the book – bugs. In this world, wasps sniff out bombs and track down intruders. Bacteria and viruses are packed into every bullet and bomb. People eat bugs, fight with bugs… they even wear bugs. For a world like that, “bugpunk” just seemed like the most appropriate kind of punk.

I’ll admit. The phrase “alien gene pirate” really intrigues me. Can you tell me about the alien? What’s a gene pirate?

You see a lot of creepy aliens in SF, but back in the day, aliens were just people who were different from you or me – different cultures, different places. I use that definition in God’s War. Aliens don’t have to have twelve tentacles and bleed acid to be scary. Sometimes the most terrifying aliens are the ones who are just like us in every way.

This alien comes from off-world, looking for some specialty genetics she can bring back to her own world to fight… well, let’s just say the universe is a pretty bloody place as I imagine it, and the world where the story takes places has some particularly cool genetic anomalies this rogue alien wants to get a hold of – stuff that looks a lot to her like the building blocks of shapeshifters and magicians.

Most people are obviously opposed to murder, but assassins are popular characters in fiction. Why do you think this is?

The more powerless people feel, the more they dream of being powerful. In our society right now, that means money, but it used to mean being physically powerful, which was how you got the money and the girls (which, of course, used to be interchangeable). If you were strong enough, you could bash somebody in the face if they got in your way. For many of us, I think the allure of the assassin is the appeal of being powerful, of not being a victim. I’d hazard to say that societies who feel the most powerless are the ones who crave stories of bloody, powerful people the most. At the end of another day trapped inside a cubicle getting yelled at by your boss for a typo and being unable to walk out because you need health insurance, well, I know the first thing I want to do when I get home is put on some boxing gloves or pick up a sword. But maybe that’s just me.

What kind of character is Nyx, anyway? Would you call her a good person? Bad person? Somewhere in between?

Nyx is her own person. I delight in creating complex characters with… unique moral codes. It’s not that she’s good or bad. I’m very much a fan of Conan and Elric, and I always wanted to create a female heroine that was as rich, epic, and bloody-minded as those guys. Somebody you’d actually be terrified to meet in a dark alley. Somebody who’d kill you before she’d sleep with you.

That said, Nyx certainly goes to bed with who she wants, kills who she wants, lives her life just the way she wants. It makes her a powerful personality, which is appealing to a lot of folks she works with, but it also makes her unpredictable. When somebody follows their own moral code instead of the accepted one, they’re also not afraid to use other people to get what they want. Nyx and I wouldn’t be the best of friends or anything, but I would certainly respect her. And get the hell out of her way.

How’d you get the idea for the story, and for Nyx specifically?

I’ve been writing about characters like Nyx in one form or another for awhile. What sealed the deal for me was when I was reading Michael Moorcock’s Wizardry and Wild Romance, in which he asks why it is we haven’t seen a female version of Conan. And I thought, yeah, why haven’t we seen that? Why aren’t our “bad ass heroines” actually scary? I wanted Nyx to have that same bloody mindedness that the best of our epic male bad asses have, without losing her complexity or her humanity. That was a tricky thing, let me tell you.

Are there any books or movies that were instrumental in helping you to envision Nyx’s world?

The world itself is certainly inspired by a lot of New Weird fiction. Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris stories and novels, KJ Bishop’s The Etched City, lots of stuff by Angela Carter and Mary Renault, China Meiville – the sort of books that wholly imagine a place and aren’t afraid to take you there in all the creepy, gory detail. For the bugs, I read Frank Herbert’s little-known but epically-titled, The Green Brain far, far too many times. I enjoy SF that’s so far future it looks like fantasy, too. Martha Wells’s City of Bones and Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun also have some of that same gritty, far-future feel to them.

As for movies, I re-watched a lot of Firefly, Pitch Black, and Carnivale for pointers on how to make a really tight, interesting group of rogues and misfits with serious personal problems. For me, creating the team dynamics was the most complicated part of the whole thing. There aren’t a lot of books that do this well, though recently, I’ve become enamored of Joe Abercrombie’s Best Served Cold, which does some amazing stuff with character, plot, and heroines with particularly…. unique morals.

Can you tell us a little bit about the sequel?

The sequel, Infidel, is out in December of this year. Our bloody heroine gets to navigate her way through a mostly-peaceful country, dragging ghosts, violence, magicians, and even creepier assassins along with her. There are some news faces, new places, and giant hornets. Also, rogue shapeshifters and mad magicians. Because you can just never have enough of those.