Archive for the ‘Karina Sumner-Smith’ Category
Karina Sumner-Smith is a fantasy author and freelance writer. She is the author of the Towers Trilogy from Talos Press: Radiant (2014), Defiant (2015) and Towers Fall (2015), which just hit bookstore shelves last week.
Prior to focusing on novel-length work, Karina published a range of fantasy, science fiction and horror short stories, including the Nebula Award nominated story “An End to All Things,” and the ultra short story “When the Zombies Win,” which appeared in Ellen Datlow’s The Best Horror of the Year, Vol 3.
Though she still thinks of Toronto as her home, Karina now lives in a small, lakefront community in rural Ontario, Canada, where she may be found lost in a book, dancing in the kitchen, or planning her next great adventure.
Karina was kind enough to chat with me a bit about the Towers trilogy, how plotting can sometimes be a plot-killer, her Sci-Fi filled youth, and her dance troupe.
Little Red Reviewer: The big idea in your Towers Trilogy is that magic is currency (you even wrote a Big Idea post at Scalzi’s Whatever!). How did you get the idea to develop a story around naturally occurring magic that is used as a currency of sorts? Once you got the idea, how did you develop the plot of the books around it?
Karina Sumner-Smith: It seems like the idea should come first, shouldn’t it? The idea that magic is currency—that magic is the driving life force of this entire society—is central to the novels, and shapes the two main characters’ lives in very different ways. Yet the idea actually stemmed from an entirely different source.
The Towers Trilogy began as a short story, “An End to All Things,” which garnered me a Nebula nomination back in 2007. I had an idea to write about a girl who can see ghosts; I sat down at my computer, and this world just opened up before me. The first scene of the short story is very similar to the opening scene in Radiant, and that’s where everything came from: the world, my entry to the story, the magical concepts, all of it. It’s all there in seed form in that tense exchange between a homeless girl, Xhea, negotiating with a distraught man who had a ghost tethered to the center of his chest.
The importance of magic-as-currency came to the fore, though, with a deeper understanding of that ghost, Shai, and why great powers were willing to go to such lengths to retrieve her, dead or alive. The idea, at its base level, is really looking at the idea of value in society, and how we decide the worth of a person. All of which makes it sound very constructed, as if this book was an intentional rant on the role of privilege in society. While that’s definitely a thematic core, the books themselves are about people: a homeless girl with no magic, living in the abandoned tunnels beneath the city; the ghost of a girl who generates magical fortunes unthinkingly; and what happens when they save each other. Xhea and Shai. Those two are where the plot came from, and (for me, at least) the source for all the book’s thematic resonances.
the Little Red Reviewer 
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