Sophia McDougall interview – part 1

Sophia McDougall was kind enough to answer some questions for Longvision. This is the first half of the interview. The second will appear later on in the weekend. In this first section, she talks about the process of creating the alternative world in the Romanitas trilogy, as well as some of her narrative, thematic and characterisation choices. It’s got some fairly minor spoilers for Savage City and larger ones for the two first books, so consider yourselves warned.

1. Why Rome? (That is, why did Rome appeal as a counterfactual story?)

Because even before I started monkeying around with it, Rome was beautiful and horrible and strange and terribly familiar. Where better to set a story?

2. You created your alternate history by changing one tiny detail of Roman history. How did you decide which one, and how did you plot out how history would then unfold?

Well, for Rome, the third century was where it all started to go wrong (…hmm, there’s a Torchwood joke to be made there). But you have to go back some time before the crisis if you’re going to credibly avert it. And I wanted the divergence point to be somewhere before Constantine and the rise of Christianity anyway – a Christian Roman Empire just doesn’t feel like the same culture. So I narrowed it down to somewhere around the death of Commodus and the accession of Severus, who achieved short-term stability at the cost of shoring up longterm problems. Gibbon called him “the principal author of the decline of the Roman Empire,” so I thought, okay, if it’s good enough for Gibbon, it’s good enough for me. So then I was looking for ways to keep Severus from ending up on the throne and place someone more far-sighted there instead and amazingly, (because I can’t pretend I’d heard of Pertinax before I started to research the book) there was this perfect candidate right there who’d been Emperor for eighty-seven days before getting murdered. So I unmurdered him.

To be honest, then history unfolded the way I wanted to to get where I needed to to go, though I did start off with some of Pertinax’s attempted reforms. Spend a weekend nursing a cold and
conquering Germany some time, I recommend it.

3. Why did you choose Japan as the other superpower/empire?

I think I saw real-world Japan as being both very old and very modern, so I thought it would lend itself well to comparisons with a Roman Empire that had survived all that time. And I thought the compare-and-contrast would work well both ways. I hoped that while an alternate Japan would be different enough from Rome to keep the world from feeling homogenous, there are similarities enough between Roman and Japanese history (and Japanese and British culture, come to that) that there would also be interesting moments of recognition, for characters on both sides and for the reader. And through Romanitas we get used to living vicariously in the modern Roman Empire – we only see it from the point of view of people who for good or ill, it’s normal. Through the Japanese characters’ eyes, we get to see it as strange.

And it was simply an ancient imperialist power with a formidable military tradition, that was far enough away from Rome that it was unlikely to have been absorbed even by a greatly expanded Roman Empire.

4. Rome Burning deals with two powers trying desperately to avoid war. I couldn’t help seeing parallels with Iraq, or possibly the Cold War. How influenced were you by contemporary politics?

I think most writers of alternate worlds are reluctant to commit themselves to such specific parallels, and I’m no different. Applicability rather than allegory, and all that. I hope the conflict in the trilogy is both specific to that world while echoing a number of real and potential conflicts in this one. Still, I don’t want to be too coy either. There’s a long arms race between two largely symmetrical power blocs, so from an external perspective I think the comparison with the Cold War is closer – and yes, I researched that period, I watched Thirteen Days, and so on. And I also think anyone who reads the novels would be massively unsurprised to learn that I planned them during the sabre-rattling period of 2002, just after the end of the “end of history” and then wrote them during the course of the Iraq War. Some of the way the international conversation about war goes – inevitably that was shaped by the times we’ve lived through. I don’t think it would be possible for anyone writing about war at this particular time not to do that. There’s a point in Rome Burning where Sulien overhears an older man in a bar saying “I think this generation needs a war.” You used to hear things like that. It seems a long time ago now.

But to come back to where I started, sometimes I deliberately wrote away from parallels with the real world as it was at that moment, so as to maintain the “alternate” in the “history”.

5. You have an extremely diverse cast of characters, but this never feels like tokenism. How conscious were you of doing this, and do you think it’s important that authors are aware of issues of representation?

I was very conscious of it. It’s sometimes said, “but self-consciousness is inimical to creativity!” and yes, that is somewhat true; a time comes to stop scrutinising the implications of every idea you have and just immerse yourself in the story and the characters. But I think that time is not at the very beginning when you’re working out what your cast is going to look like. If you want a future where fiction doesn’t routinely perpetuate harmful stereotypes and ignore everyone except the white people, (especially if you are white yourself) you probably cannot assume your unexamined muse and your good intentions are going to do all the work for you.

All that said, I feel it’s hard to answer this question without sounding self-congratulatory:– there have been, as there should be, a lot of conversations on and offline about representation. In that context, I don’t want to jump in and say, “why yes, this is how I went about getting this right.” After all, the first book does mostly focus on three white kids. There were reasons why I felt those three had to be white, and there are a number of important, point-of-view characters characters who are P.O.C, (Varius, Delir, Lal, Ziye) but still, the names you’ll probably use when summarising the plot of Romanitas belong to white people. However, through Rome Burning and Savage City, more characters come in and existing ones become more prominent, the focus expands beyond Europe, and I think by the end the ranks of the good guys are only about 20 per cent white. And it mattered to me that it ended up that way – as well as all the other reasons, this is a novel about a whole world, with a very cosmopolitan city at its heart. To populate the narrative with characters from a very narrow range of backgrounds just wouldn’t have made any sense.

I realise I’ve been answering this question mostly in terms of race but of course there are issues of gender and sexuality too. This was a long project, and my thinking on all these topics evolved through it. For example, there’s a character who’s revealed to be gay in the final book. I always knew that character was gay, but in the early days I was going to do a bit of a Dumbledore and just know the character’s sexuality in my own head and not mention it in the text. I can’t remember at what point I thought, wait, that’s stupid. And there’s a particular conversation between two women in Savage City which I planned from the very beginning and which is utterly crucial to that book. But it became increasingly important to me to show women having complicated and interesting relationships with each other.

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