660. Murder By Memory with Olivia Waite

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Sarah Wendell: Hello there! Welcome to episode number 660 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books. I’m Sarah Wendell. My guest today is Olivia Waite. Olivia is here to talk about Murder by Memory, her new cozy space mystery. We’re going to talk about the characters, inspiration, tactile memories, and what sport is not on the ship. And then we have some book recommendations, because Olivia’s really good at that.

Three things: first, TRIGGER WARNING: we are discussing a little bit of the COVID pandemic and lockdown and things like that.

Number two: I have a compliment! I love doing this.

To Roxanna G.: The bulbs that are spearing out of the earth right now have saved up extra energy over the winter just so they could put on a very colorful show for you.

If you would like a compliment or you would like to support this show, I bet you know, if you’ve been listening, what to do: patreon.com/SmartBitches. We have the most lovely Discord community. You get extra stuff. You get the whole PDF ep-, you know, the thing, the PDF, the – what’s that called? – scan. Yes. You know, what? I’m not even taking that out. You get the whole PDF scan of Romantic Times every month. It’s really fun! And you get to support this here program.

And item number three: I wanted to share with you the cover copy, because we jump right into the conversation about the ship and the people and the stuff that’s happening, and if you are not familiar with Murder by Memory or you haven’t read it, of course I don’t spoil anything, but context helps, right? So this is the cover copy, and then we’ll get on to the interview!

The tagline is “Becky Chambers meets Miss Marple.” I love it!

>> Welcome to the HMS Fairweather, Her Majesty’s most luxurious interstellar passenger liner. Room and board are included, new bodies graciously provided upon request, and should you desire a rest between lifetimes, your mind shall be most carefully preserved in glass in the library, shielded from every danger.

>> Near the topmost deck of an interstellar generation ship, Dorothy Gentleman wakes up in a body that isn’t hers, just as someone else is found murdered. As one of the ship’s detectives, Dorothy usually delights in unraveling the schemes on board the Fairweather, but when she finds that someone is not only killing bodies but purposefully deleting minds from the library, she realizes something even more sinister is afoot.

Spoiler: I love when things are afoot.

>> Dorothy suspects her misfortune is partly the fault of her reckless nephew Ruthie, who, despite his brilliance as a programmer, leaves chaos in his cheerful wake. Or perhaps the sultry yarn store proprietor – and ex-girlfriend of the body Dorothy is currently inhabiting – knows more than she’s letting on. Whatever it is, Dorothy intends to solve this case, because someone has done the impossible and found a way to make murder on the Fairweather a very permanent state indeed. A mastermind may be at work, and if so they’ve had three hundred years to perfect their schemes.

Are you ready to talk about Murder by Memory? Let’s do this! On with the podcast.

[music]

Sarah: Thank you for doing this!

Olivia Waite: Oh no, it’s always a pleasure! I’ve been very excited about this one! [Laughs]

Sarah: Yay! I’m so glad! I know you’re doing a lot for this book, so thank you for adding me in to your schedule. I’m really excited to talk to you about this book.

Olivia: Oh yeah! This was a fun one. I still can’t believe this is real, honestly. [Laughs]

Sarah: Okay! Well, that’s exactly what I want to hear about, so!

Olivia: My name is Olivia Waite. I am the romance fiction columnist for the New York Times Book Review. I am an author of queer historical romance, sci-fi, and fantasy. I write a lot of essays. And I think that’s most of it these days.

Sarah: It is never not going to make me go Woohoo! inside every time you say I’m the New York Times romance columnist?

Olivia: It’s still bonkers.

Sarah: Congratulations on Murder by Memory. I remember when I saw this book announced I went, Oh my God, that’s cool! What led you into writing this book? Because, as you mentioned, you do write queer historicals, and this is a queer, uh, completely other direction, in the future!

Olivia: Yes! Well, I’ve always been a sci-fi/fantasy reader from way back, and so it wasn’t that big a leap internally, but definitely, like, from a public standpoint, people are like, Didn’t you just skip several centuries? And the answer is yes. But the thing is, is worldbuilding for historicals is very similar to worldbuilding for a fantasy or sci-fi novel. Things have to be consistent; things have to be a certain amount of plausible. Like, you can hand-wave some stuff like try not to think about how people throw things away in the Regency if you can possibly help it? I know Rose Lerner once went on like a half-an-hour internet search trying to find out what would somebody have done with this apple core? [Laughs]

Sarah: That does sound like Rose. But what was the answer?

Olivia: She, she conclude – like, she couldn’t find anything really definitive, but she concluded they probably would have thrown it just into the fire and just let it become part of that whole –

Sarah: That makes sense.

Olivia: – system of disposal. When you’re building a, like, a science fiction world, you have to think about those kind of things. You have to think about infrastructure. You have to think about, Does this feel workable? But it also has to feel interesting and fun enough.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Olivia: Like, everybody jokes about Victor Hugo talking about the Paris sewers, and it splits the readership, because half the people are like, Why are we talking about the Paris sewers? Who cares? And the other half is like, Give me everything about the Paris sewers.

Sarah: I am team sewers a hundred percent. I need to know everything.

Olivia: Yeah.

Sarah: I, I do love a good infrastructure.

Olivia: Exactly!

Sarah: Yeah!

Olivia: And it’s always been, it’s always been interesting to me, partly because as a, as a nerdy teenager I did deep dives, ‘cause I especially liked comic fantasy and sci-fi, and it was a bit harder to find. So you, you’ve got your, your Pratchetts and your Robert Asprin and your Douglas Adams, but I went deep into this stuff. I was, like, reading Lord Dunsany, who was writing, like, comic fantasy in the Victorian era.

Sarah: Oh my!

Olivia: And so, so for me, like, the historical aspect of it was always kind of part of the interest, is how do people write the future in these very different time periods? So I was always interested in retrofuturism, and people like to bring in, they bring in, like, Soviet aesthetics every now and again when they’re building dystopias, and they bring in, like, you know, with Murder by Memory it’s the 1920s –

Sarah: Yeah.

Olivia: – partly because a lot of the things happening in the 1920s feel so relevant still. Right.

Sarah: You don’t say…

Olivia: Yeah, like, you know, an influenza pandemic and a stock market crash and –

Sarah: Consolidation of wealth in the top five percent, yeah.

Olivia: – political…

Sarah: I, my 650th episode was with Joanna Shupe, because she did a video saying, telling her newsletter readers who were mad at her for, like, explaining her politics through her books? Like, how did you miss that? Well, then, clearly I’m not for you, and that’s fine, and we are not the same, and we don’t agree, and you should probably not read me. But we did a whole episode about all of those parallels, so yeah, I think there’s going to be a lot of re-examining of the ‘10s and ‘20s right now.

Olivia: Yes. And congratulations on 650. That’s so many! Oh my –

Sarah: Thank you. If you, if you’d like to know, I have my schedule up; you’re going to be episode 660. I’ve been doing this for a minute.

[Laughter]

Sarah: A few, a few minutes.

I have so many questions about Murder by Memory. I have a bunch of questions about the ship. I have so many questions about Fairweather? First, I want to ask about the name Fairweather. That’s really interesting. Where did you, where did you start with that name?

Olivia: You know, I don’t actually know where that one came up? That was just one of those, like, I was writing this book fairly early in the pandemic, and it was just a –

Sarah: Oh, wow! That makes sense.

Olivia: Yeah, and it was just a, a fun escape for me, because I was having a horrible pandemic, as many people were. Like, lost relatives. I had to go into the hospital for surgery in the time, like, in that pre-vaccine time when they were only doing the emergency procedures?

Sarah: Yikes!

Olivia: I was, like, literally the only patient in the ward. It was like being in a haunted house that was also operating on you? Like, do not recommend. Highly. Everybody was…

Sarah: I can see the connection, though. I can see the connection between an empty hospital ward and this ship where so many people are in books.

Olivia: Yeah. Yeah, and so I wanted to get somewhere that was safe, that was elsewhere, but I also felt like everybody was kind of in their own little separate, locked-away room. I was watching murder mysteries to get through a lot of the recovery process. We were absolutely mainlining Poirot at this time. Like, just nonstop David Suchet. And then somebody on Twitter, as it was, asked the question, Well, why aren’t there more mysteries set on a generation ship? It’s a perfect little locked room setting. And I was thinking about Agatha Christie, and I was thinking about P. G. Wodehouse cruise ships, and I just went, Yes. Future ship, but it’s also a ‘20s cruise ship, and I’m like, Yeah, that’s where I want to be; that’s what I want to do. And so it was, I believe, the winter of 2020, and I just sat down and, like, I’m just going to have me some fun right now. Like, I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing right now. The world is in turmoil. Half of it’s on fire! Time to write a book.

Sarah: I mean, yes! [Laughs]

Olivia: Yeah. And I don’t know. Then I, like, I sat down and I started to write, and I’m like, Obviously I want this ship to be named Fairweather. Like, it just kind of came out the fingers, and I’m like, Yes, that is correct, and of course she needs a nickname ‘cause, well, the ship needs a nickname. I don’t know what the ship’s pronouns are yet. I’m thinking they are ship. [Laughs]

Sarah: I mean, fair.

Olivia: Yeah. So, but Ferry just showed up and, you know, because if you have a Wodehouse aunt, you need a Wodehouse nephew, or hopefully several, and then you get more Wodehouse aunts, and it just kind of snowballs. So, look, I love a romance, and there is in fact a romance arc in this series – nobody will be surprised. But it’s really fun to structure a series around a different relationship dynamic for a change?

Sarah: Yes.

Olivia: Nice, refreshing change of pace. And so this one is very much aunt/nephew kind of dynamics throughout the whole series, and all the various permutations of people that we get kind of reflect on the meaning of family that is kind of in addition to a parental?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Olivia: Because, you know, Dorothy and her nephew and the ship, they have a very, like, parental, they’re very close. It’s, it’s, like, parent-adjacent? As, like, aunts and uncles are.

Sarah: Yeah. It’s, it’s elder, not direct.

Olivia: Right.

Sarah: Yeah.

Olivia: The fun thing about the memory books is that means you can change up people’s ages. So sometimes Ruthie is younger than his aunt, and sometimes he’s older than his aunt, because, like, you know, people are coming in and out of bodies as, as bodies age and die, and so you get these interesting tensions that you can change just for fun?

Sarah: Ooh.

Olivia: And so that’s been great.

Sarah: So let me ask you to back up and explain the setup for the ship and the, and the books and the people. What is going on in this book? Which, by the way, was the perfect length for my debilitated attention span at this time?

Olivia: We all need novellas…

Sarah: I was so ex- – I was like, Oh my God, it’s less than two hundred pages, yes! Because, I mean, there is plenty, if you like a six-hundred-page book, the world is yours right now, but this was so –

Olivia: No, I’ve been saving The Priory of the Orange Tree. Like, it’s been –

Sarah: Yeah.

Olivia: – out, like –

Sarah: I’m so excited that this was a short book. So please tell me the, explain the basic setup of what’s going on here.

Olivia: So we have left Earth. We’re journeying to a planet that is a thousand years away, and in the meantime it’s kind of being treated as, well, I guess there’s a, it’s a vacation? It’s like a leisure passage?

Sarah: Yes, and you said earlier it was a cruise, and I was like, It’s both a cruise and a ferry at the same time.

Olivia: Yeah.

Sarah: It’s like transatlantic, except transuniverse.

Olivia: Exactly. So we’re, so we’ve got a long way to go. We’re about three hundred years in, in book one, and it’s, most generation ships, the idea is, you know, you have successive generations happening.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Olivia: And so the ship keeps going, and the people live and die and are born and then have children and then die, etc. You know, like normal human lifespan stuff. But I wanted to do something a little different, and so I thought, Well, what if you could buy a passage on this ship and then store your memories somehow, and so every time your body dies you get issued a new body, but your memories just keep going. And so obviously if you’re storing something, it’s going to be in a book, and this is where some of the plausibility comes in, because glass solid-state memory is a thing that many people are working on right now? Like, I know Microsoft has one project –

Sarah: Wooow!

Olivia: – where you actually do etch data into glass blocks?

Sarah: Which is both renewable, less taxing on the environment, doesn’t require mining. You can melt it down and start over.

Olivia: Like, incredibly stable.

Sarah: That is a very, very future stable concept. I had no idea; that’s really interesting!

Olivia: Yeah. It’s one of my favorite things. Like, I’ve been reading up on glass history. That’s become one of my, like, nuclear history, glass history, Antarctica, the Manhattan Project – you know, fun – textile history. Fun, little, like, always picking up a book on it; always reading an article on it.

Sarah: Yeah.

Olivia: One of the threads that my brain likes to keep track of.

Sarah: Blowing shit up or melting shit down. Either way –

Olivia: Yeah!

Sarah: – it’s fine.

Olivia: And glass, glass is one of those great things because it’s both very ancient historically –

Sarah: Yes.

Olivia: – and deeply futuristic. So –

Sarah: Yes.

Olivia: – I, I think it’s a really good material to use in this kind of blend.

Sarah: For sure!

So you have a person on the ship, and they’re going to be on this ship for a couple bunch of years. Like, it’s a really long –

Olivia: Yeah.

Sarah: – back-to-back-to-back-to-back cruise. We’re just going to go around, we’re going to go across the universe instead of around the planet.

Olivia: We’re just, we pointed our prow forward, and we’re going there. Bye!

Sarah: You have everyone’s memories in basically etched memory books, and then as you die, you get a new body. And you mentioned earlier that characters can come back younger than or older than – the lead, Dorothy, Dorothy Gentleman, she talks about how her bodies are not very durable.

Olivia: Yeah.

Sarah: So she will be reassigned a body that has a lot of the same degenerative problems as her prior one. Is that her choice, then? Or is that just, This is the body you have, because this is the body you had, and we’re basically remixing it?

Olivia: Yeah, basically it’s tied to your genome. So you have, like –

Sarah: Right.

Olivia: – you put, you put the genome – so it’s genotype and phenotype, and so your genotype is much, much bigger –

Sarah: Yes.

Olivia: – and it gets a little reshuffled every time. If, for instance, your original body was one gender and you would prefer to exist as another gender, that is absolutely no problem; that’s a very easy switch to make. But, like, changing skin color, changing hair color, that’s, that’s a thing you can do yourself, but that’s not something the ship will do with you.

Sarah: Right. That makes sense.

Olivia: Switching genders or picking a specific gender that may not be in line with what you originally boarded the ship with is all perfectly above board and it’s fine. Some people switch back and forth. We have a character who we meet in, well, he’s mentioned when he’s using male pronouns in the first book, but in the, think it’s the third book?

Sarah: Oh!

Olivia: He’s trying on feminine pronouns for a little – he, he likes to switch back and forth. He says it keeps his wardrobe more varied?

Sarah: I mean, fa-, story checks out, right?

Olivia: Yeah.

Sarah: So Dorothy wakes up, and she’s not in her body, and she’s meant to be chilling in her book, sleeping and having a good old, like, memory-relaxing time, no body. She wakes up in someone else’s body, she’s in an elevator, and the ship is drunk.

Olivia: Yes. [Laughs]

Sarah: So she has to figure out what is she doing; what, why am I here; what am I doing; what happened; and why are you drunk?

Olivia: Exactly. Everything’s locked down. Everything’s strange. It’s very disorienting. The body’s wrong; the body’s new. It belongs to someone else. That’s not supposed to happen.

Sarah: Right.

Olivia: Like, somebody, she notices that somebody has painted her nails, which means this isn’t a blank body.

Sarah: Yeah.

Olivia: She’s not waking up in Medical. And so –

Sarah: This is a body in progress of somebody else’s life on the ship.

Olivia: Yes! So, like, it’s like coming, it’s like waking up from a sleep to find you’re driving someone’s car, and you don’t know how you got on the freeway.

Sarah: Yeah.

Olivia: And so it’s very disorienting. And so she snaps into her default mode, which is detective.

Sarah: Right. And the ship is drunk because it’s going through electrical storms in space, which just make it a bit wonky. It’s not like it can drink or anything.

Olivia: No, no, the ship cannot drink, but the magnetic forces do disorient enough of the magnets that it gets kind of, you know, the ship equivalent of dizzy.

Sarah: Yeah. Think, Ooh! This is not great. So he’s a little seasick.

Olivia: It is, yeah.

Sarah: A little seasick. So Dorothy wakes up. She’s got a problem to solve: her own and then what’s happening on the ship and why was she yanked out? Because Ferry tells her, I put you here.

Olivia: Yes. I did this. It’s not supposed to be possible.

Sarah: I have super good reasons for it, but I’m going to need to lie down first. I’ll tell you later.

Olivia: Exactly. And so –

Sarah: And then has to sleep it off.

Olivia: …Dorothy says, Whenever something goes wrong, whenever something is strange and baffling, it’s usually my nephew’s fault –

Sarah: [Snorts]

Olivia: – so I’m going to go talk to my nephew…

Sarah: And?

Olivia: And then we meet Ruthie!

Sarah: And we meet Ruthie. I have to say, Ruthie and, and their partner were probably two of my favorite people in this book. They’re so wholesome in such a lovely, fuzzy way. Like, it was just truly wonderful. And Ruthie’s partner has a really interesting job!

Olivia: Yes!

Sarah: Let me just critique you, ‘cause that’s not rude or anything. There is so much hinted-at backstory by this guy?

Olivia: [Laughs]

Sarah: I was like, What kind of fanfic are you trying to start? Like, there’s all of these hints, like bucket-sized hints –

Olivia: [Indistinct]

Sarah: – and I’m like, Olivia, what the hell are you doing? Are you trying to make AO3 fanfic happen? You’re just –

Olivia: [Laughs]

Sarah: – you’re just teasing us! It’s so not cool! Like –

Olivia: I hope there will be fanfic –

Sarah: Right?

Olivia: – but I can’t read any of it!

Sarah: No, of course not!

Olivia: Somebody else has to go enjoy that!…

Sarah: So I’m just going to yell at you now.

Olivia: Yeah.

[Laughter]

Sarah: Yelling at you now: you made this guy too interesting and gave him too few scenes! This is, this is a dangerous thing.

Olivia: I know. We’re going to be seeing a lot more of John in future, like, because I kind of, you know, I fell in love with him too. He was supposed to, he was supposed to be kind of more of an obstacle, but I loved him too much. [Laughs]

Sarah: You know, you have Dorothy and Dorothy’s story, but then there’s also John –

Olivia: Yeah.

Sarah: – and you get the feeling that he is the protagonist of a whole other mess of business and that he is not giving anything away, and I’m very nosy, so this is a problem for me.

[Laughter]

Sarah: Masterful job making me go, Oooh! Wait a minute, that’s all we get? There’s more there!

Olivia: Yeah, we definitely find out more about some of John’s secrets in book two – three, sorry, book three.

Sarah: Ah!

Olivia: Book two is, We’re going to mess with everybody. Book two is the screwball comedy romp.

Sarah: Ye-hee!

Olivia: Book three is Chickens are coming home to roost.

Sarah: Oh, I hate when the chickens come home. I’m going to ask you about books two and three in a second, but well done on creating a character who is so full of secrets. I was, like, riveted every time they were on the page.

Olivia: It’s a, it’s a murder mystery! Everybody’s got skeletons in the closet –

Sarah: Yes.

Olivia: – even Ruthie.

Sarah: You’ve already written book two and book three?

Olivia: Yes. Book two, the title is Nobody’s Baby, and it’s printed – I know it’s official because it’s printed in the hardback, so –

Sarah: Hell yeah! When is that coming out?

Olivia: I believe that’s next year.

Sarah: And then do you know the title of the third?

Olivia: I don’t yet. I have a working title, but I think it’s probably spoiler-y to say.

Sarah: Okay, well, then we won’t say that, ‘cause we don’t want to do that.

Olivia: They were bought as a set, which was very exciting.

Sarah: That is very reassuring for, from all of the people involved. Thank you. Appreciate it.

Olivia: Yes. One of the things that we’re hearing in a lot of the early reviews is people saying, This book was so short; that’s perfect; I want more.

Sarah: Yes! It’s a, that was exactly my experience. Like, I will not lie.

Olivia: I wanted people to have a good time starting from jump. I think book two and three are a little bit longer –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Olivia: – just because the mysteries ended up having a few more steps.

Sarah: That makes sense, though, ‘cause if you’re writing novellas it’s almost like you’re writing episodic volumes. It’s not –

Olivia: Exactly! Yeah, it’s like –

Sarah: – it’s not a serial, but these are episodes.

Olivia: Yeah. And I’ve done, I’ve done novellas before, and I’ve done linked novellas, but this is the first time where it’s, like, very clearly a series arc? And I actually have six planned out.

Sarah: Damn! Okay!

Olivia: Even before, even before we sold, sold the first three I’m like, Okay, I know exactly how many books there are, and I know exactly, like, the shape, the general shapes of each book. So in book six we finally reach the planet, and there’s a lot of decisions I haven’t made about what happens in book six yet. Are there other people who’ve already landed on the planet or not? And –

Sarah: Are we colonizing, or are we just joining?

Olivia: I just haven’t decided yet! [Laughs]

Sarah: Yeah. Are we colonizing, or are we just hooking up? What’s the deal?

Olivia: Exactly, yeah. One thing that I do know is when we get to the planet, we stop the rebirths. Those, those are only for the ship.

Sarah: Ohhh! That’s interesting.

Olivia: So when you get to the planet, whatever body you’re in, that’s it.

Sarah: That’s the one.

Olivia: Nobody gets to be immortal after that. We have other things to use those resources for. You get to start having kids again, ‘cause nobody –

Sarah: Ahhh!

Olivia: …the Fairweather is allowed to have kids, because we just don’t have the room –

Sarah: Of course!

Olivia: – and we don’t want to, like – yeah, it’s a spaceship. It’s limited availability.

Sarah: There are a lot of things that I expect to be solved in the future, and I expect that mortality rates for pregnant women will be lower. However, having a baby is serious business biologically and medically speaking, and that’s a lot of resources.

Olivia: And, like, doing all of that out in space with so many unknowns, they’re like, You know what?

Sarah: Let’s –

Olivia: We’re just not going to worry about it.

Sarah: We’re not going to do that.

Olivia: Like, we’re all going to make it to the planet – spoilers: they don’t. That’s why the murders happen, but –

Sarah: [Snorts]

Olivia: – some people will, in fact, be murdered in the course of this story.

Sarah: I mean, it is a murder mystery series; kind of comes with the –

Olivia: It is a murder mystery, yeah.

Sarah: – territory, yeah.

So I want to ask about the memory drinks, without spoiling too much. One of the characters has the ability to make, mix a cocktail that will make you experience something physically.

Olivia: Yes.

Sarah: Okay. Is this going to be a larger concept in future books? That seems incredibly powerful. And it’s also an interesting, for me it’s an interesting allegory of what books do?

Olivia: Exactly, yeah!

Sarah: Because I was, I was writing recently about the HEA and how we have all these portmanteaus that blend romance and another word, and I think the reason those are important is because they are signaling Happy Ending. You are safe –

Olivia: Yes.

Sarah: – here. You are able to trust the structure, and you know how we’re going to, you know where we’re going to go. You just don’t know how we’re going to get there. The idea that a book makes you feel something physical is both very powerful and very threatening to people. And Dr. Tingle has a much better explanation of this, but the books that are most maligned are the ones that give us the most physical reactions in our physical bodies that we can’t control. We have horror that makes us –

Olivia: Exactly!

Sarah: – fear, fear, and we have –

Olivia: …arousal, but it’s also, like –

Sarah: Emotions!

Olivia: Yeah!

Sarah: Squishy ones!

Olivia: Yeah, like the messy, that swoop in the belly is…

Sarah: Yes! I call them chest tingles, but yes. Like, the minute there’s really good dialogue in my whole, like, my whole chest is like, brrr! Like, there are physical reactions of the body, and I found this idea of the memory drink so evocative, because it is also creating a physical and mental experience in a beverage.

So can you talk a little bit about that without spoiling too much? I don’t know how much of that is going to be a spoiler in future books, but I found that so interesting.

Olivia: We’re definitely diving into that in a pretty serious way in book three.

Sarah: So you can have a spinoff cocktail book is what I’m saying.

Olivia: Well, yes, and we do actually have a lovely little postcard for the Summer Storm –

Sarah: Love it!

Olivia: – which is based on a Dark and Stormy, which –

Sarah: Oh, fantastic.

Olivia: – the good folks at Tor, like, made up a recipe for me, and it’s delicious.

Sarah: Oh, I love publishers who encourage us to drink.

Olivia: Yeah! [Laughs]

Sarah: I’m a big fan.

Olivia: Some of it, if I may be utterly pretentious for a day, because when you’re, when you’re a romance author and critic, what do you read for fun? You read Proust, obviously.

Sarah: Obvs.

Olivia: So, you know, I’m, I’ve been meandering my slow way through Proust and loving every second of it, weirdly enough. Like, like, eating it up with a spoon like it’s prime, uncut drama, which it is. This anxious ball of memory and reflection and forward anxiety and – I love him so much. But the, the idea that, that a scent or a food, like the madeleines, the most famous example, but it comes up a lot: he goes on this extended paragraph description of asparagus, and it’s one of the most beautiful things I have ever read in my life, and then he ends it with the most elegant piss joke you’ve ever heard –

Sarah: [Snorts]

Olivia: – in your life.

Sarah: I mean, you can’t talk about asparagus without getting to what happens with asparagus. It’s –

Olivia: Exactly!

Sarah: It’s like Chekhov’s gun, except it’s asparagus pee.

Olivia: Yeah. Precisely –

Sarah: Yeah.

Olivia: – and Proust absolutely delivers in this gorgeous paragraph, and then you get to the end and you’re like, I’m sorry, what?

Sarah: Beg your pardon? [Laughs]

Olivia: And I’m, like, it’s completely changed my relationship to asparagus in general, like, just, like, from a, from an aesthetic and artistic point of view. Like, I’m actually making tiny little asparaguses out of beads right now?

Sarah: Aw!

Olivia: It’s like a mélange, which is a thing that nerds do, but one of the things in Proust is this sense that food and drink aren’t just pleasures of the body in the moment; that they are keys that unlock certain memories and experiences in the mind as well…

Sarah: Okay!

Olivia: …argue.

Sarah: Yep.

Olivia: And so, for me, eating and drinking isn’t just about the deliciousness of that thing at the time. It, it is about connecting to, where did you learn to make this particular recipe? What kind of beverage is this? I, I know I drink different beverages in different settings, like many people do. Like, you know, you have coffee in the morning; you have tea in the evening; you have a glass of wine over dinner; you have cocktails at karaoke with friends! There’s different beverages for different purposes, but I will slightly spoil this by saying one of the reasons why the memory cocktails are the way they are is, you’ll start to notice all the memory cocktails are experiences that you can’t get on the Fairweather.

Sarah: Yes, I noticed that. What, they’re –

Olivia: Yeah.

Sarah: – a lot of them were weather.

Olivia: Yep. Weather and vistas. There’s no horizon on the ship, so there’s, like, standing at the beach at sunset.

Sarah: Grass in a field. None of that either.

Olivia: Yep.

Sarah: Yep.

Olivia: A feeling of wind.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Olivia: And so they’re all of these deeply human experiences of life and nature that you can’t get in this artificial environment, but that need to be preserved in order for people to remember who they are and what they, what they come from.

Sarah: And it’s also a tactile experience of a place that you can’t touch anymore.

Olivia: Right.

Sarah: Yeah.

Olivia: And some-, so sometimes, depending on the skill of the mixologist, sometimes it’s a fun little, like, brief moment –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Olivia: – and other times it is like a full-body, transportive experience. You know, just like any food. There’s the sandwich you buy at the grocery store on your lunch break, and then there’s the hand-crafted, artisanal, homemade-bread sandwich that is not, not the same quality of experience.

Sarah: No, completely different. And, and especially if you made the bread, you know what went into it. Like, you touched all of the ingredients to make it, so it’s much more visceral and personal, because it –

Olivia: And it, and it took some of your time. Like, some of your time –

Sarah: Yeah.

Olivia: – is invested in this.

Sarah: Yeah. And effort and desire to do science. You know, as you do.

Olivia: Mm, yeah.

Sarah: So you have fabulous cocktails. You have assorted characters. We have a detective. We’ve got some weird-ass stuff going on. Got a drunk ship. And then Dorothy meets another character who has a yarn shop. We’ve touched a little bit about on the sequels and what happens and what you’re doing. What’s next for Dorothy? Can you share a little bit about where she’s, where her arc goes in the coming books? And do we get a pattern for the shawl that she admires so much in the yarn shop?

Olivia: …do. That’s going to be – [laughs] – I hate, I hate to just be like, Yeah, wait till book three. Book two is going to spend more time kind of getting to know other people and other communities on the Fairweather, and then book three, again, chickens coming home to roost!

Sarah: Yeah.

Olivia: Book two is about a little more of what, what people are doing to kind of keep themselves busy, and how they’re reacting to this journey, and how they’re balancing the tension of, well, I had one lifetime on Earth, but now I have several lifetimes. I have so much more time to fill; I have so much more scope for the things I want to do. I can achieve all of my dreams in this span of time.

Sarah: And I can learn whatever I want, and I will preserve that knowledge into my next body. Hell yes!

Olivia: Exactly. Exactly! But –

Sarah: I would be the, I would be the master of so many things.

Olivia: Yeah! Like, and so no – housing’s guaranteed, food’s guaranteed. Everybody has a basic income. Nobody’s, nobody lacks anything. You can, you can, you can work. Janitorial services are very highly paid because it’s a very necessary job. Medical is very highly paid. And most of the time people do the things that they’re excited about! People start selling food out of their, like, living rooms. People start yarn stores. People do tinkering. There’s sports leagues; there’s printing presses. It’s like, it was basically what you saw during the pandemic where people suddenly were able to stay home, and they suddenly had time, and everybody started making things. Everybody started doing art, everybody started baking, and it wasn’t just a stress release. It’s, when you give people space, they will get creative immediately.

Sarah: Oh yes, absolutely. Absolutely. I remember ages ago reading a book called the Cognitive Surplus, that with each generation we inherit more time, because we have things that are more efficient. We have appliances, we have shortened wait for things, and with that extra brain energy – this is, I think Clay Shirky wrote this – with that extra brain energy we are creating and engaging and seeking, you know, connection.

Olivia: Yeah.

Sarah: So it makes total sense. I mean, it’s also kind of glorious to think about, like, you will have a new body, you’ll have a really long journey, and you can choose to learn and do whatever you want.

I loved, by the way, how you incorporated, like, cottage industries, which were originally a cottage with part of the mill on top, and you, like, lived –

Olivia: Yeah.

Sarah: – at your job? But now you have these little houses, these little, like, living areas with little store fronts in the front, and if you were like, I’m going to start a yarn store, well, you’ve already got the space, ‘cause it’s where you live. I kind of dig it! You just put cottage industries right in the ship. That makes so much sense.

Olivia: Exactly! And, you know, people can move around. There’s plenty, there’s plenty of room. ‘Cause people, there’s always somebody, like, taking a break in the library. We did lose some people early on through accidents; that was unfortunate. And, but they planned for a surplus anyways. So there’s different nar-, different neighborhoods have slightly different characters. It started off, you know, fairly generic. Like, there’s a set of apartments down at the base of the garden that actually have little greenhouse sections for people who enjoy gardening. It’s just been really fun. So there’s, you know, I haven’t, I haven’t visited the sports leagues yet, but they’re there. They’re – [laughs]

Sarah: I, I am guessing that there is some very serious and competitive pickleball going on on this ship.

Olivia: Yeah, actually, I had to make it soccer.

Sarah: Okay. Fair enough.

Olivia: Because, like, Britain 1920s, which I guess would have been, like, cricket, but I didn’t want to eve and go near the whole cricket problem.

Sarah: That’s quite a lot.

Olivia: I would have to understand cricket to do it, and…

Sarah: Yeah, and I don’t – just make it pickleball, and if anyone asks be like, It’s the future. Pickleball is inevitable for all of us.

Olivia: …to be pickleball. [Laughs] I don’t know why!

Sarah: No, it’s fine. I don’t blame you at all. My, my father-in-law’s obsessed with pickleball. Like, literally we joke about how obsessed he is with it. He’s the mayor of pickleball. It’s kind of…

Olivia: Yep.

Sarah: So pickleball people are obsessive, so please, you do not have to use pickleball.

Olivia: No, my mom, my mom is, is also very into –

Sarah: Hardcore. Hardcore pickleball. Weird, right?

Olivia: We moved, we moved into a place a year ago, a year and a bit – year and a half now; wow! – we moved into a place that actually has a sport court, and it’s got, like, a little, like, basketball hoops, and unfortunately with, like, the hand injuries – don’t pack books yourself if you have hand injuries, by the way.

Sarah: Bad idea.

Olivia: Mom wanted us to turn the sport court into a pickleball court, and we are not doing that. We did turn it into a go kart track at one point.

Sarah: Oh, dope!

Olivia: That was fun.

Sarah: That’s very cool!

Olivia: It’s not very big. It’s a very small go kart, but –

Sarah: It’s still got go karts.

Olivia: We did a whole Taskmaster task about it, so.

Sarah: Most excellent.

Olivia: [Laughs] It’s really fun.

Sarah: So this book is very much a mix of tropes and genres. It’s got a really great, like, set of adjectives: it’s like cozy, lesbian, sci-fi murder mystery?

Olivia: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: Those words together’ll make a lot of people sit up and go, What? Sorry? If a reader loves this book –

Olivia: Yes.

Sarah: – there aren’t many in the coz-bian, cozy, lesbian, sci-fi murder mystery genre.

Olivia: There’s more than there used to be!

Sarah: There’s more than there used to be, but I can –

Olivia: I mean, there’s Malka Older’s Mossa and Pleiti books, which are, if you have not read those, they are delightful.

Sarah: This was my question: what other books can you recommend that have some of those same elements?

Olivia: Oh yes. So…

Sarah: I didn’t know this was my jam! Tell me everything. [Laughs]

Olivia: Mossa and Pleiti. I mean, what is it, The Importance of Unnecessary Obstacles? I get my titles all confused. Malka Older, Mossa and Pleiti, P-L-E-I-T-I, and it’s basically sci-fi set on Jupiter, so it’s a gas planet, and Earth has become uninhabitable, and they are looking back at Earth and trying to make it rehabitable again? And everybody’s existing along rail lines in the clouds of this gas giant, and it’s all academic infighting, Sherlock and Watson, but they’re both women. It’s –

Sarah: Oh my!

Olivia: – a delight. Yeah.

Sarah: So this is The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles –

Olivia: That’s the first one.

Sarah: – by Mal-, Malka – I’m going to say that right – Malka Older.

Olivia: Yep.

Sarah: Excellent! Fabulous!

Olivia: And then, I haven’t read this one yet myself, because sometimes, sometimes when you’re writing something close to, you need to not read?

Sarah: Oh no, absolutely. I completely understand.

Olivia: So I’ve been saving it, but Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Spare Man?

Sarah: Yep!

Olivia: And Aliette de Bodard has The Tea Master and the Detective, and just anything Aliette de Bodard, especially her space novels? Like, her Fallen Paris are wonderful and gorgeous and terrifying, and her space novels are slightly cozier sometimes, when they’re not The Count of Monte Cristo, which is also fun. But she has a Vietnamese-inflected space opera world that she does short books and full-length novels in, and they’re delightful.

Sarah: That’s lovely! You will really like The Spare Man. It’s a good time.

Olivia: Yeah.

Sarah: It’s a really good time.

Olivia: No, Mary Robinette Kowal is my jam. I am like –

Sarah: That’s very cool.

Olivia: – this is one of my break glass, break glass, like, I know I’m going to love this kind of –

Sarah: Oh yeah. For sure. What other books are you reading that you want to tell people about?

Olivia: Well, I just finished this one. I don’t know if you’ve read any of Constance Fay’s space romances?

Sarah: I have not. Tell me everything.

Olivia: Oooh! The third one’s just about to come out, or just out maybe this week. But the first one is called Calamity, and it’s, it’s space opera, but not like in, like, not interplanetary politics space opera. It’s pew-pew lasers, bounty hunters space opera. And so the first one is Calamity Jane in space. You have your ragtag crew of bounty hunters, and they get hired for a job by one of the wealthy families, but the family insists on sending their own security guy, who’s like, you know, the second cousin family relation or something. And he’s a jerk, and he’s super arrogant, and he’s super hot, and oh no. And –

Sarah: Hate that!

Olivia: And it’s a really good time, and they’re bouncily violent? It’s delightful. And the first one’s great fun. And some, it, there’s one scene at the end that I just, I can’t, I can’t spoil for anybody, but it started to happen, and I started to yell and laugh because it was so gory and horrifying that all I could do was giggle.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Olivia: It was amazing!

Sarah: I think bouncy violence is a good way to put that.

Olivia: Yeah.

Sarah: Like, this is not real; this isn’t serious; we’re not going to hose you down in viscera; but bad shit is going on in a bouncy kind of way!

Olivia: Yeah, and also maybe we’ll hose you down in viscera, but you will have something very witty to say about it. Like –

Sarah: Yes. For sure.

Olivia: Like, there are some very bad people doing some very bad things in a volcano cult.

That’s the first one. The second one is even better. The second one is jaw-dropping.

Sarah: Really!

Olivia: Yeah, the second one is about a gal on the run from her home planet. Her sister was kidnapped and murdered by a famous serial kidnapper, and she’s been trying to track them down.

Sarah: Ooh!

Olivia: And the healer on the bounty hunter ship, who ends up trying to help her and unearthing her secrets, and it’s a big old mess, and, and it’s fantastic, and it’s terrifying and wonderful and gorgeous.

And then the third one is our tech genius from the ship, and she ends up on a prison planet with this super soldier who is mind-controlled by one of the evil families, but his mind control breaks as soon as she touches him?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Olivia: And shenanigans ensue.

Sarah: Hate when the shenanigans ensue – actually, no, I like it.

Olivia: They’re so much fun. It’s like, it’s like a funnier adventure-y version of, like, the Adriana Anders, like, Whiteout series? Like, the intensity of that thriller? If you add a little, if you soften that and add a little more comedy, it’s more like broad slapstick?

Sarah: Right.

Olivia: That’s pretty much what you’re getting.

Sarah: Nice. Have you read –

Olivia: Yeah, they’re fantastic.

Sarah: Have you read The Murder of Mr. Ma? By –

Olivia: No!

Sarah: – John Shen Yen Nee and S. J. Rozan? I think I’m saying Rozan correctly; if I said that wrong, my bad. So The Murder of Mr. Ma is the kind of sort of rich combination of historical and contemporary and future that would be straight up your street?

Olivia: Mm, yeah.

Sarah: So it is a – so you remember the Sherlock Holmes with Jude Law and Robert Downey, Jr.

Olivia: Oh yeah.

Sarah: The movie that was kind of like Sherlock and Holmes, like, off the wall.

Olivia: Yeah.

Sarah: Like, somebody’s tripping balls when they made this movie. So it’s like that –

Olivia: Yeah.

Sarah: – because there is martial arts and action, and it’s early 20th-century London. The lead character is Judge Dee, who is based on a historical Chinese literary figure, who has been solving crime for a long-ass time. Like, Judge Dee –

Olivia: Yeah.

Sarah: – is a very established figure. This is Judge Dee in the 20th-century London Chinatown. He’s addicted to opium; he has mastered martial arts; will kick the ass of anyone who gets in his way –

Olivia: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – and he is paired up with a very shy, very academic person who is like, What am I doing here? Why am I partnered with this guy? Where is he going? Shit, I have to catch up. And so you have both the, the sort of audience surrogate, what the hell character, and then you have this character who is just absolutely fucking incredible, and they’re going to solve mysteries together in the ‘20s. So it’s kind of up your street –

Olivia: I would like all of that!

Sarah: Yeah, it’s really up your street, especially in the way that it blends historical literary genres and contemporary literary genres in a part of the world and a period of time we don’t see a lot of that. So it’s a, it’s like a mix of historical fiction and historical mystery and ass-kicking.

Olivia: I feel like I bought the first one of these because I, maybe I saw it on NetGalley? ‘Cause I remember thinking like, Yes, I want murders to be solved in London’s Chinatown. Like –

Sarah: Yeah!

Olivia: Like, like –

Sarah: Why wouldn’t I?

Olivia: Yeah. That sounds great.

Sarah: I am so excited that you did this. Thank you so much for talking about your book. I will encourage everyone who’s listening to buy it multiple times.

Where can people find you if you wish to be found?

Olivia: The easiest way to find me is at the website, oliviawaite.com? You can find links to my newsletter and whatever socials I’m currently using. Right now that’s very much Bluesky, which is great.

Sarah: Roger that.

Olivia: There is an event! I’m doing an in-person event for the first time in five years, which sounds like I’m coming out of hermit land with –

Sarah: I mean, we kind of are?

Olivia: I know. Sort of true. I will be masking; we’re asking the audience to mask; I will have our wonderful little air filter that is whisper quiet and feels like a very, a very high-end fan. So it’s –

Sarah: I love those.

Olivia: Yeah, one of the little, the little portable HEPA filters, and they’re so charming, and they work like gangbusters! So – ‘cause nobody needs to get more sick than they already have.

Sarah: No, absolutely not.

Olivia: That is on March 25th at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park at 7 p.m.

Sarah: Fantastic! Thank you so much for talking about your book with me. I’ve had the best time.

Olivia: [Laughs] Sarah, it’s always fun to talk to you!

Sarah: Thank you!

[outro]

Sarah: And that brings us to the end of this week’s episode. Thank you, as always, to Olivia Waite for hanging out with me, and of course I will have links to every book we talked about, because of course we talked about several, and I love getting book recs from guests; it’s the most fun.

I will also have links where you can purchase your own copy of Murder by Memory, or you can request it from your local library. I have read it. It is quite fun.

As always, I end with a bad joke. Are you ready? It’s really bad.

What do you get when you cross an apple with Spider-Man?

Give up? What do you get when you cross an apple with Spider-Man?

Cider-Man!

[Laughs] I know you’re groaning. Sorry! Not really.

On behalf of everyone here, we wish you the very best of reading. Have a wonderful weekend. We’ll see you back here next week!

And in the words of my favorite retired podcast Friendshipping, thank you for listening; you’re welcome for talking.

[end of music]