Interview with Kemi Ashing-Giwa

By Isaiah Roby on July 16, 2024

Y'all I don't think you are ready for this. Ashing-Giwa (digitally) sat down with iam and me to talk about her debut novel, This World is Not Yours. LOOK AT THAT COVER. The second I read the description, I knew I needed this book. The world needs more queer sci-fi horror.

Kemi: What themes, tropes, and/or topics in SFF make a story irresistible to you?
- Isaiah: I am all about the character development. I want a character that I either love or that I love to hate. Space operas tend to be something I enjoy over more hardcore sci-fi. Fantasy has to make me forget that I am learning a brand-new world system or I will easily fall out of the story and not look back. Fully fleshed-out characters can pull me through even if I start to slip. iam has been a huge push in my life to try out more SFF. I have learned I am really into non-humanoid characters and SFF/Horror as a blend. Give me that space horror and I am going to binge-read.
- iam: I am a big sucker for truly alien aliens, and cultural exchange in that context—the more genuinely alien, the better! I also discovered the horror genre for myself a couple years ago, and based on my other interests got really into the niches of deep sea, deep space, and caving horror—all the better if the three of them get combined! Ultimately, all it takes for me to get excited for a book is a cool setup or starting point, no matter how whack.
Kemi: How have your tastes changed over time, and do you think your work as a reviewer has had an impact on that?
- Isaiah: I know I have changed. Ten years ago I wouldn't be caught reading SFF. I just couldn't wrap my head around the genre at all. Now I am learning to love it. I think it's not just me, but the genre has changed too. The books aren't just books for my dad anymore, now there are books being made for me. Some of my likes and dislikes have stayed the same, but some have gotten more intense or flipped. Even week to week my tastes can change. Right now, I can only seem to handle fluffier romances. My brain is fried from school. Over the break between classes, I devoured graphic novels of all genres. Reviewing books has opened me up to trying new things a bit more. It for sure has gotten me more involved in indie author circles. Authors and publishers email me and I learn about all sorts of books I may not have heard of before. I feel really bad telling an author or publisher that I am not interested, so I try really hard to be open-minded. I guess reviewing has made me more open and less prone to getting stuck in genre or author ruts. There is always something new coming out!
- iam: I am a mood reader, and my reading moods are very flighty. I used to be big into romance but spent the past few years barely reading any romance at all. My hobbies outside of reading can also influence my reading moods. I went down a rabbit hole of cave diving disaster videos, which ultimately sparked my interest in horror, and made me find the niche of deep sea and caving horror! That said, my journey as a reviewer has influenced my reading as well. I started reviewing as a way to keep track of my own thoughts about the books I was reading. That led to me getting ARCs, and eventually, I oriented my reading more around what ARCs I could get access to, and I fell down a spiral of requesting way more books than I could handle. By now I've found more of a balance, where I only request what I really want to read in that moment.
Kemi: What ruins a book for you?
- Isaiah: So much. I don't mean to be discouraging to authors, but there are so many ways to go wrong. The biggest issue I have that a book can't come back from is when an author includes transphobia, homophobia, or racism for no reason. Stories with those elements can be amazing, but that is because the hate has a purpose. Books like Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark have racism as a central issue. The racism makes sense, it moves the story, it motivates the characters. Alex Silver has a lot of trans characters, but never relies on transphobia for plots. They stay away from the One True Plot (trans characters only existing to be raped, murdered, and/or miserable) and allow for more stories.
- iam: For me, it often comes down to the overall vibe. Sometimes I can just tell a book is not for me, even when I can also objectively acknowledge that it's not a bad book—it just does not work for me, be it due to the narrative voice or the direction the plot takes. I could go on about how important suspension of disbelief is to me, or that sometimes it's a "wrong place, wrong time" issue, but to truly ruin a book for me it has to have a bad ending. As in an ending I do not like, an unhappy ending, a lack of closure, or just not what I wanted to happen. (I always want unambiguously happy endings, and loooong epilogues.) A bad ending will always stay with me, way more than a bad beginning. It will always leave a bad feeling whenever I think about it, and that ruins the memory.
Kemi: For better or worse, whenever I pick up a new book or start a new show, I find myself picking it apart—I ask myself what works, what doesn't, and how I can replicate or avoid those things in my own projects. As professional book critics, do you do something similar with recreational media? Are you able to turn off that part of your mind in your free time, and if so, do you?
- Isaiah: Professional is very strong for what I do! I review in my spare time and ramble at best. I can usually turn off my brain when I am engaging with shows and movies, partially because I have to be crafting or doing something else to stay awake. Most of my energy then goes towards the logic puzzle on my phone or my cross-stitch project, instead of picking apart a show. I am most critical of horror movies. My wife has to hear my long rants about them and will vouch for just how wild I get with that. With books, I usually just go along until something stands out as really cool, weird, or awful. I try to enjoy the book, even if I am reading it to review it. I will always be a book lover first. Reviewing is just a way to scream into the void about my many opinions and to promote the authors that I enjoyed.
- iam: Both yes and no. I do often take note of things that stand out to me from a reviewer's perspective while reading (less so when watching media, I'm not big on visual media actually), but I think I am able to keep that quite separate from just being in the moment. There are plenty of books that are objectively riddled with flaws, but that my heart absolutely adores. It does make reviewing tricky, but ultimately, reading is what I do in my free time, and reviews benefit from honesty. Even if that honesty is "it's so bad. I love it!". Another aspect of this is that taking apart media critically can be fun. I enjoy ranting with friends about a terrible book I've read, and I have many a fond memory of buddy reads where my co-readers and I ended up screaming at the book together. And for better or worse, it's almost easier to talk at length about why a book sucked, than about what I loved in a book (I do need to work on that). So rather than seeing that critical side as an annoyance, I try to view it as an asset.
Isaiah: Now it is your turn! Tor Nightfire/Macmillan is a huge name. How did you go about getting such a big backing for your debut novella?
- Kemi: I'd worked with the editor, Jen Gunnels, on a couple of short stories published on Tor.com (now Reactor) before, so we already had a creative relationship. This World Is Not Yours was initially meant to be a short story, maybe 5,000 words, but Jen pushed me to develop it into something longer so I could have more space to flesh out the characters, further develop their relationships, and explore the world. I was a bit hesitant at first, but it was absolutely the right thing to do. After I had the novella drafted with a few extra chapters outlined, Jen presented the story to the acquisitions people at Macmillan. The rest is history.
Isaiah: Queer SFF is what made me start being able to enjoy the genre. What queer elements did you see as necessary to get across in your novella? What did you wish you had more space for? (Pun only mildly intended)
- Kemi: The idea for the novella arose from, among other things, a desire to write about enforced heterosexuality, from social expectations to restrictive laws to violence. I also wanted to explore gender essentialism and bodily autonomy, and there is, of course, a lot of overlap between those three subjects. I don't know if I'd call the queer parts of the book "elements," because I'd say there aren't parts that are queer to begin with—the whole thing was meant to be queer, in more than one sense of the word. One of the nice things about Tor is that they publish fiction in all shapes and sizes, so word count was never a concern; I had complete freedom to make the story exactly as long or as short as it needed to be, so fortunately, there was space for everything I wanted to include.
Isaiah: I have not read your book, just yet, but based on the blurb and the letter to the reader, it appears that the key themes are survival and colonization. Without spoiling too much, how did you approach the horror aspects of both?
- Kemi: I'd say that most, if not all, horror involves some sort of survival story—the tension arises from a danger that threatens the characters' lives, or at least their wellbeing. My novella explores survival from two angles: there are the soldiers and scientists trying to establish competing settlements on the planet, and then there's the planet itself, a sapient being with thoughts and feelings that, while incomprehensible to humans, are very real. And for this world, colonization is the very worst kind of violation. I can't say much more without spoiling the book, but the oppression experienced by the main characters is certainly meant to mirror, and be mirrored by, the colonies' exploitation of their new home.
Isaiah: In a sunshine and unicorn world where your book gets published no matter what you write, would you write next?
- Kemi: Well, right now I'm working on a space opera about the rise and fall of a friendship that has consequences of galactic proportions. My aim is to produce a story that treats a platonic relationship with all the care, respect, time, and yes, drama that is typically reserved for traditional romances. Hopefully, it won't be too hard of a sell. My fingers are crossed!
iam: What is the easiest and the hardest part of writing a book?
- Kemi: For the hardest part, there's always a tug of war between coming up with a coherent plot and revising, and the one that wins out in the end is whichever I'm currently doing. Writing the actual manuscript can take a while since I'm busy with grad school, but it's relatively painless overall. Once I know the path the story will take—and this often shifts a bit—it's smooth sailing from there.
iam: While I do not consider myself a writer, I do occasionally dabble in a short story here or there—and I found that the things I tend to enjoy writing are also the things I would HATE to read. Do you write about things you would want and enjoy to read yourself?
- Kemi: I generally write what I want to read, though I never re-read something of mine once it gets published. When I was in high school, I'd rework the same story idea several times with varyingly large changes until I finally got the story to feel acceptably close to what I'd first envisioned. Nowadays, it'd be all but impossible for me to write something that shared much in common with anything I've had published before, and I think that's because I have to really dig into my own work as I revise it. (I never went back to edit any of my early stories once I'd finished them.) I spend far longer with my characters and in the same worlds now, so when I'm finally done with a piece, I really am done.
iam: As a science fiction writer, how do you come up with names and concepts for technology/sciences/mechanisms in your stories, and how much do you research about it?
- Kemi: Assuming that some current names will survive into the future and new ones will arise with time, I like to do a mix of real-world and made-up names. This is true for both people and technology. So in This World Is Not Yours, there are "hovercrafts" but also "talkglasses." The amount of research depends on what I'm writing about. Like a hovercraft, a talkglass is relatively self-explanatory—it's a transparent computer that's primarily used for communication. But when I designed formal taxonomic classifications that I wanted to sound realistic, I looked into real-world species names for flora and fauna that share characteristics with or inspired whatever I was describing, and then developed terms that paid tribute to the real-world lifeform(s).
iam: Do people you meet, experiences that are on your mind, or just your day-to-day mood, ever sneak into your writing? If yes, how so, and do you consider it an asset?
- Kemi: Oh, definitely, and I'd consider it an asset. I want my characters to feel like real people. I want my worlds, however speculative, to feel like real locations. As an author, my job is to lie, and to lie so well that I'm able to get readers to believe what I'm offering on the page, if only for a split second. That's the goal, anyway, and taking inspiration from the world around me brings me closer to achieving it. I assume that must be true for all authors. On some level, we're all writing what we know, even if what we're writing about is people living a thousand years in the future. Art isn't created in a vacuum, and you can't wholly separate yourself from the world you live in, no matter how objective you might aspire to be.

If you want to learn more about Ashing-Giwa, please check out her site. The book drops on September 10th, 2024. Pre-orders are open! I will be back with a review of the book, just in case you are still on the fence. Trust me, this book is worth pre-ordering.

~Isaiah