Full Fathom Five AMA Roundup

A few selected answers

Thanks all of you who showed up for the Full Fathom Five AMA yesterday! I had a great time with the questions and conversation, and also there’s a charming dog in the thread, if that’s not enough encouragement for you to click through. Here are a few highlight questions and answers—with many more at r/Craftsequence. Thanks again to Hannah of TheHiddenSchools.com and to the r/CraftSequence mods for hosting and organizing the Craft Countdown.

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From Hannah, focusing on one of my favorite deep-cut moments: “"Simple accident: a zombie-crewed containership from Southern Kath wrecked in a storm. The containership had been hired to transport a horror from beyond the stars, but the horror broke free and twisted a few hundred miles of Kathic coastline into unearthly geometries before the Coast Guard caught it."

Referencing the death of an early face of the Blue Lady, this quote seems to reference the spirecliffs we visit in WICKED PROBLEMS. And if it doesn't, well, crazy random happenstance it occurred twice!

Was this intended as set up for a future plot, or a seed that flourished naturally?

And is Jace to blame for the spirecliffs and everything that happened since??”"

That's absolutely the Spirecliffs disaster, yes! I wrote that paragraph not knowing exactly how it would be useful, but knowing that it would be—it had too much spark to leave on the shelf. I'd already touched on the Skazzerai a bit in 2SR—glancing references—and the related questions of "well, what if there was metastatic surveillance / attention capitalism elsewhere too" and "what's all this 'pointing toward' anyway" (to the extent history is pointing toward anything) were obviously on my mind. I'd wanted to come back to that vision for a while and on a re-read prior to the Craft Wars it jumped out to me as exactly the sort of thing the Two Serpents Group would be involved in, that Dawn would chase, & obviously the Kavekanese Priesthood are involved—so it would bring everyone together.

I don't know if that means Jace is to blame for everything that has happened since—the tensions that came to a head in the Spirecliffs were certainly building—but it is a fun bit of irony (god, I hope I'm using that right, I got seriously Alanis-pillled in the 90s and have been unable to use it precisely ever since) that Jace's attempt to stop a particular sort of sentient Craftwork entity to protect his position / the Priesthood ended up precipitating (1) a cataclysmic event for another priesthood (2) the release of some seriously bad-news stuff, e.g. the live skazzerai shard (3) Dawn's eventual empowerment and threat to the entire Craftwork system (for good or ill). He's a key domino!

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u/frightfulpleasance asks: “Precision beats generality...I can name it, its whole and its parts. That gives me control.

The naming scheme for the entire Sequence acts as a guidepost for navigating the non-linear metanarrative, but the individual novels all have names that serve to demarcate their own identities in the space of story.

Three Parts Dead gives us a taste of the Craft, a mixture of the noumenal (life and death) with the actuarial (a mere three parts!). (Also, taking from a Russell quote is the most diabolical of choices in the best kind of way; a luminary of rigid, law-bound logical investigation writing on love and marriage. Magnificent!). Two Serpents Rise gives us a double-meaning (Hah!) in that there are two serpents which do rise, and in the subsequent rise of the eponymous group precipitated thereby.

Full Fathom Five, though, ups the ante and pulls allusively from a conversation already in progress, evoking both the themes and preoccupations of the Tempest and the myth- and identity-making brooding in Plath's poem that shares the name.

How much of the choice of name was to fit the purposes of the Craft Sequence, and how much was a conscious connection to that already unfolding literary dialogue? (Or, put another way, how much was clever branding, and how much were you intending to nerd snipe?)”

Column A (marketing considerations) imposed some inspiring constraints on my search for a title that would sing on a nerd-snip level. There was value in orienting readers within the non-linear metanarrative, that did constrain my choices of title to those with numbers in them, and gave some guidance as to which number. But the choice of proper title—that needed to be something that sang at the resonant frequency of the book. Full Fathom Five, of all the number titles, is the one that sings the most to me—in part because I was not thinking about Shakespeare at all during the composition, and yet found that (I suppose not surprisingly for a Tempest fan) I’d written an island story concerned with colonialism, transformation, self-fashioning, and magic, where people are (sort of) confined to (a type of) cloven pines, with a wizard (of one sort) distorting and re-fashioning the people of an island to suit his own ends (though Jace is of course native to Kavekana)—with various forms of sea change “into something rich and strange.” Margot and Mako have their own Prospero energies; there might not be shipwrecks on page but there are people who wash up on the shore… Kai’s hardly a Miranda figure, but if I sat and thought about it for a while maybe the resonances there would sing, too. Certainly she has undergone a “sea change”. And there’s the present absence of her drowned father, who’s so in the book for me that I was surprised on re-read to realize that (unless I missed something) I never spelled out what happened to him between these covers. & the Skazzerai have a bit of Caliban-upon-Setebos energy, too. The more time passes, the more right the title feels to me.

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u/monkeydave asks: “This is a book that I did not appreciate the first time I read it. I think that it works so much better in the context of having read Four Roads Cross, and perhaps even Last First Snow.

It provides a different look at the God Wars and how society has adjusted post-War that LFS helps put into perspective. And the status of Seril, Cat and the partnership between Tara and Two Serpents Group from 4RC helps with understanding the plot.

My question would be, how much of Four Roads Cross had been planned prior to writing Full Fathom Five?”

I'm glad that the context improved the book for you! FF5 is one of my favorites in the series in part because of how difficult it was to write—it seems quite common for the first book written after debut publication to be a hassle, & I was trying to write the first chapters while on tour for Three Parts Dead. Nobody had warned me that this was a pretty bad idea. So when the whole thing came together, it felt all the more sweet.

To your question, I had a general sense of what had to happen between 2SR and 3PD and the events of Full Fathom Five. I loved the idea of time-skipping ahead a bit and approaching characters and situations from the earlier books from a different angle, in part because that gap and perspective shift, plus the fact that characters like Cat and Teo aren't telling the full story on their first appearance, would (in success) get readers drawing false conclusions about what must have happened in the missing fourth book. That was fun on a craft level, and thematic in a book that deals with transformations and the gap between things-as-they-are and things-as-they-should-be—and I was reading a lot of Gene Wolfe at the time... Of course playing things close-to-the-vest like that can be detrimental to engagement.

But even though I had a general sense of what would have to happen in Four Roads Cross, my first attempts at drafting that book revealed that I was wrong about many of the particulars. I was right about the tensions that would have to be resolved—and I was right about the resolutions—but there was a lot I didn't know about the scene-by-scene break, or even about the central plot problems. It's kind of like how a Go player might know that there were a few major questions to be answered in the board's upper left, but might be wrong about how exactly play would unfold when it reached that area. For example, I realized when I dug into the draft of 4RC that I hadn't paid nearly enough attention to the challenges Alt Coulumb would face incorporating Seril and her children back into society; 3PD ends in a good place for Kos and inner church folks, but there were a lot of questions to be answered about the city.

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Another Hannah question, this time about… “Izza. I absolutely love Izza. On first read, I think I overlooked her as a protagonist because she didn't fit the mould of our mid-20s millennials figuring out their place in the world, and I didn't realise she was a co-lead with Kai until much further in the book than I should have. Her background makes her fairly unique thus far in the series, someone existing on the margins of a society that isn't built for them, whereas most of our other characters are (to some extent) part of the system.

Can you talk a bit about the development of Izza's character, and the perspective you wanted her to bring?”

Izza! My stabby theft-child. I loved writing her and I love where the story’s taken her since. You’re absolutely right that she’s an atypical protagonist for the Craft Sequence, which in its earlier volumes focused on characters dealing with what maybe we’re allowed to call ’New Adult’ problems in 2025? maybe? She’s poor, she’s outcast, she’s young, she lives by her wits; for her the glass-walled rooms with air conditioning are alien and suspect and quite likely enable the enormities and terrors she has experienced.

In a way, this makes her closer to the structural position of ‘traditional’ fantasy protagonists, like Simon in The Dragonbone Chair—that is, she’s a person outside the halls of power who finds herself caught up in a world of elite machinations (and, you know, prophecy, magic, etc). From her perspective, Domain looks a lot more like Lankhmar (or Ankh-Morpork). That was a bit of a challenge I faced in this book, to keep the weird-modernism through-a-glass-darkly professional tone with a character who spends so much of her time on the periphery. Sometimes I think that fantasy—certainly this is true of much of late 20th-century fantasy—is defined by its perspective from (a certain sort of) periphery: the hobbit, the farmboy, the barbarian, the street rat, the swordsman. Of all the characters, in a way, she’s closest to Dawn.

I also wanted her life-on-the-edge to feel real, and really dangerous. People die in her world; they’re hurt. Kai’s relative security, and Margot’s, stands out in the contrast. I’m heartbroken by her appeals to Margot—on some level Margot just doesn’t get that he can die, that he is really in danger. That was a real concern while writing—there is some romance to that Aladdin one-step-ahead-of-the-head-man character, but this is also a person who, for all her resources, is often unsure where her next meal is coming from.

I needed her for the Kavekana book. This is a book with a lot of tensions and transformations in it—Kavekana is a liminal space. It derives its power from being neither a priestly stronghold nor a Craftwork town; Kai feels ‘on the outside of whatever side there was’ and it felt important to have someone for whom Kai herself represented the inside. Someone for whom the status quo held no appeal.