In the third episode of SH@25, editor Kat Kourbeti sits down with author Arkady Martine, whose Strange Horizons debut was in 2014, for an in-depth interview on her multifaceted career, her review writing, and the history that inspired her two-time Hugo Award winning Teixcalaan Empire series.

We also present a reading of Arkady's poem, Cloud Wall, which marked her Strange Horizons debut, and remains to this day one of three poems she ever published, with reading by Kat Kourbeti and sound design by Michael Ireland.

• The music heard in the poetry segment is 'Uprising' by Scott Buckley - released under CC-BY 4.0.
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• Join our Patreon for early episode access.

• Follow Arkady Martine on BlueSky (@byzantienne.bsky.social)
• Buy Arkady's books through Bookshop.org
• Read Arkady's reviews in Strange Horizons, linked in her author archive page
• A full list of Arkady's short fiction can be found on her website
• Find more links to Arkady's work as you read along the transcript below.

Transcript

Kat Kourbeti: Hello, Strangers, and welcome to SH@25, a 25th anniversary celebration of Strange Horizons. I'm your host, Kat Kourbeti, and it's my privilege today to welcome you to another episode that looks back at the history and impact of Strange Horizons on the speculative genres. Today's guest is is none other than the fantastic Arkady Martine, who was first published with us a whole host of 10 years ago, and has since gone on to win multiple Hugo Awards, to write fantastic novels, but also to have her own separate, perhaps a little secretive, career in the government. Sort of. Almost.

Arkady Martine: Weird public policy with energy in it.

Kat Kourbeti: I'm so excited to dive into all of this with you, mostly your writing really, and to see like how it's all gelled together over the course of a decade plus. So welcome.

Arkady Martine: Thank you. It's great to be here.

Kat Kourbeti: So you write a lot of, really interesting stuff that comes from a place of love for history, but also intense love of science fiction, space operas, really.

Arkady Martine: Oh, yes. I think I've said this somewhere, but I write science fiction when I'm trying really hard not to. It's kind of the default genre for me, and that comes from starting to read it when I was very, very small, like under the age of six, maybe. My dad was a big science fiction fan and he left books around and thus, so am I.

Kat Kourbeti: What were some of your earliest memories of science fiction?

Arkady Martine: I read a lot of stuff that probably I should not have been reading at that age and didn't understand entirely. Like I read Melissa Scott's Burning Bright at like age nine, which is young for that novel, but formative, one could say.

Kat Kourbeti: So I'm really interested to hear about your background as a historian. We're gonna dive into it a little bit because, as someone who's from Thessaloniki, which is in Greece, but in a formerly Byzantine place—and you're a Byzantienne—I've always loved seeing something that comes from, sort of my corner of the world, but with a touch of space. And I want to pick your brains about how that happened.

Arkady Martine: Oh, sure. So I am professionally trained as a Byzantinist. I have a Ph. D. in Medieval History, which is basically a PhD in Byzantine history, and I spent a decade of my life doing that professionally. I specialized in the late 10th, early 11th century, mostly in the imperial east, so, what is today kind of the Turkish Armenian border, and I ended up doing a subspecialty in Armenian actually, to really explore how imperial contact on borderlands was working in that time period. And I've always been super interested in, I'd say cultural imperialism and how it works. And the medieval cases, of course, different than later cases. But it's a deep fascination, and I fell in love with Byzantium in undergrad.

Actually, I was a religious studies and physics double major for 18 year old reasons, like when you're 18, you think, ah, I will figure out the universe one way or the other way. Turns out that I couldn't really get past partial differential equations. So not a physicist. I got fairly far, but not a physicist. And, for the religious studies half, we had a required course that we needed to take a course on Islam, which you should as a religious studies major. And I happened to select a course on Byzantium and Islam and the early Arab conquests in the seventh century, taught by a specialist in that area, professor named Walter Kege, who sadly passed away a couple of years ago. And it was very old school. It was a three hour lecture, and I was an undergrad, three hour lecture. You sit there, he talks, you take notes, and then he gives you 200 pages of scholarly reading.

Now, if you're a complete nerd, like I am, that worked great. And I got absolutely fascinated with kind of the interaction between religious ideology and imperial power and literature and how all of those things get knotted together in a really fascinating way, in the Byzantine slash later Roman empire, and stuck with it and ended up doing a PhD on it. My dissertation focused on diplomats and how they wrote letters and what kinds of cultural production they were engaged in, when they were "out in the field". Because I'm always interested in what people do when their systems of understanding the world are challenged, especially people who come from an imperializing culture, because their reactions are very powerful and very interesting, and sometimes very destructive, and sometimes very surprising.

So as you can probably tell, all of this ended up in my first two novels. I was simultaneously writing A Memory Called Empire during a postdoc I was doing on narratology historiography in the 11th century, when I was living in Sweden. I sort of did half of that and halfway wrote a book about—not the same things, there is no one to one, if anyone was hoping that there was, that you could find a secret plot key—but more the ideas that I was thinking about in an academic way became the ideas that I was obsessed with emotionally, and that always ends up being what I write about.

Kat Kourbeti: I think very recently there was a discussion online about the themes that writers find themselves returning to in their work. And I don't know if there was some kind of resistance to that idea initially, because I think all the responses I've been seeing and certainly mine was, "but don't we all just return to the same stuff?"

Arkady Martine: I think we do. Everyone has core obsessions and filters. I think that there is also a certain amount of pressure for writers to worry about being repetitive. I know I do worry about being repetitive, or worry that I've said what I meant to say and now I need to find something else to talk about, but I'm also a very theme and structure oriented writer to begin with, which means I probably think about this more than I need to. And certainly as a reader, I love when writers have continuous, career long thematics. Even in books that have no actual connection to one another. So, if that's true for me as a reader, I have to give that grace to my readers, too.

Kat Kourbeti: Absolutely. I just think that there needs to be room for artists of all formats to iterate and to play around with those things that they are fascinated by and they're trying to figure out or they're trying to kind of explore. And maybe there's an answer to those questions and maybe there isn't, but the joy is in the iteration, I think.

You weren't always writing novels. A lot of your earlier work is short, and in fact, you also wrote speculative poetry, which I think is fantastic.

Arkady Martine: Actually, the first thing that Strange Horizons published of mine, and that was probably the first poem I had ever published. No, it was the first poem I'd ever published, I don't count things I wrote in middle school.

So I've published three poems in my whole life. If you don't count things that are inside books, which I don't really, because they're different. And I don't know how to write poetry. Sometimes I manage it. For prose, I have a pretty good sense of craft at this point, and I know how to edit it, I know how to make it better. For poetry, it's still that lightning strike kind of thing. So it doesn't happen all that much. I actually, when I wrote the poem that you all published, which is called Cloud Wall, which is probably still maybe my favorite poem I've ever written, I was completely doing one of those, "Oh, I'll just send this to a really good market because they won't buy it". Cause I've never really written speculative poetry before. And then was very surprised and delighted when you all did back in, I think 2014.

Kat Kourbeti: Wow. I love that. I love that story. I love that it was a Hail Mary kind of, and it just kind of goes to show, don't self reject. Sometimes the thing—

Arkady Martine: Oh yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: —will find a home immediately.

Arkady Martine: I say I'm not a poet and I'm really not like it is not my native form, but, if you write something, no matter what genre it's in, poetry, prose, speculative, otherwise, and you know it's good, it probably is at least not bad. So.

Kat Kourbeti: Exactly. Have, have that faith.

Tell me a little bit about that journey. First of all, of finding Strange Horizons as a reader, initially. Like, were you reading it for a long time before you decided to submit?

Arkady Martine: I don't think a long time, but definitely several years. So I got kind of serious about professionally writing in maybe 2011, 2010. I'd always written, like as a kid I'd written stuff, and then I'd written a bunch of fanfic, which is a delightful and wonderful way to write, but I made a decision around 2010, 2011, that I really wanted to write original stories for publication, and I was very deliberate about it. But part of that was that I had fallen in with some good friends who were already professional writers, and who passed around short stories from many magazines, and Strange Horizons was one of them. And it turned out that I tended to like the stories in Strange Horizons with a much higher hit rate than a lot of other places. There's some other magazines that have good hit rates for me, but Strange Horizons is still up there, that if someone sends me a Strange Horizons story, I think, Oh, I'm probably really going to enjoy this. And there's a particular tonality and, focus, I guess, sense of, expansive openness to the weird without being a "weird fiction" magazine, which is another thing that I really like.

And also that fits pretty well with the kind of short fiction I tend to write. It's funny, I was looking back for this interview on what I have published in Strange Horizons and it is actually dominated by fantasy, which is fascinating to me, because I write less of that. But I guess it turns out that the fantasy I do write is a very Strange Horizons kind of fantasy.

Kat Kourbeti: Just kind of ethereal and like weird without being " weird fiction", but there's always kind of a nebulousness about the fantasy in a Strange Horizons story, which was what drew me to volunteer here was, I really like this sort of stuff kind of the most.

Tell me a little bit about Cloud Wall, because it is the first and, we're in a landmark year where, speculative poetry is on the kind of map and, Seattle's introducing a speculative poetry Hugo and all of that.

Arkady Martine: That's so exciting. I'm so happy about that.

Kat Kourbeti: I'm really happy. Yeah. So tell me a little bit about the inception for Cloud Wall, what drew you to this idea, what you wanted to write about.

Arkady Martine: I'm a New Yorker. Cloud Wall's a love story, but it's a New York love story. So it's not very nice. It's good, but it's not nice. I am, as a writer and as a person, deeply fascinated by cities and by the way that cities have a possessive quality to them. And I mean possessive in the sense of possession, but also in the sense of belonging.

I mean, I haven't formally lived in New York for more than a decade, actually, but it is still home and it is still the thing that animates me as a person in the world, is that city. I was in London earlier this summer and I thought again, "Oh, London doesn't like me very much," because I'm too much of a New Yorker with that kind of like city magic. It can tolerate me, but I belong to something else. And that kind of thinking is behind Cloud Wall. The title actually comes from a Mark Halperin novel, which is called Winter's Tale. They made a movie out of it a couple years ago, which I don't like and don't recommend, but I highly recommend the novel. If you love New York, it's a touchstone book for me. And there's a thing in it called a "Cloud Wall", which is sort of a manifestation of a perfectly just city, but also an apocalypse. And that poem is a very small version of that idea, I think. And it's also a little bit about what happens when you marry a God, when the God is a city.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, I always subscribe to the idea that cities have personalities. I live in London and I can definitely feel that, like the spirit of that city. And everywhere I visit, I think that there's a different energy, a different something. So that's beautiful.

Arkady Martine: London just doesn't do nice things for me. There's nothing, it's not against me or anything, but little things that normally I have good city luck, like lights turning for me, or knowing where things are, or never getting lost, or being able to like, produce sushi at one in the morning. In London, all of those things seem possible and don't work, so it's just like the city is sort of amused.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, thinking about it now, I don't know where you can get sushi at 1am in London. So to be fair... maybe it's just the city being like, no, you can't have nice things.

Arkady Martine: Upstart New Yorker, what are you doing here?

Kat Kourbeti: So what was the journey of this poem to getting published? It was part of our fund drive special, so it's probably slightly different, maybe, to a normal poem publication, I guess.

Arkady Martine: I have no idea, because it was the first time I published a poem. It was also the first time I published with Strange Horizons. So, I just sent the poem in the normal submission queue. And when I got a response, it was a yes, and can we put it in this fund drive? And I was like, I have no name recognition. No one knows me, but I guess you like this poem. So sure.

Kat Kourbeti: Oh, the hindsight. Now that we're looking at it in the archives, it's like, ooh, we published an Arkady Martine poem.

Arkady Martine: There are only three! And one of them is really hard to find.

Kat Kourbeti: So was this wholesale what you sent? Was there a lot of editing involved?

Arkady Martine: Very little. I did a lot of editing before I sent it to you. I asked a friend of mine who had studied poetry, to read it and to help me get the prose out of it, basically. The very first version I wrote, I remember being more prose heavy than it needed to be. And that's always why I don't think of myself as a poet, is that I write a very lyrical, very high language. I'm interested in prosody as a prose writer, and sentence rhythm and sound. But as a poet, I tend towards an unnecessary wordiness that comes from being a prose writer. So getting that out without losing the feeling is a trick.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. I'm always happy to hear that the editing approach that our staff has had historically and also currently is very much, letting the work speak for itself. We don't tend to try to morph it into something else, which I know that other venues sometimes do. So it's nice to know that. But you've also published short fiction with us, and also some nonfiction, some reviews. Tell me a little bit about the reviewing.

Arkady Martine: Oh gosh, I am a deep believer in the art of the critique, in a critical culture, in criticism as a kind of appreciative, deep exploration and an art in and of itself. Strange Horizons is one of the very few places in the universe of speculative fiction reviewing, which is not a review blog. It doesn't tell you what the book is about and what you can expect as a reader.

It tells you what the story is about, and how it relates to other stories and other literary movements. This is something I adore about Strange Horizons reviews. I really enjoyed doing the work of trying to produce them. They are not easy. A good one is like writing a very accessible academic article, especially with what you all gave me to review. I mean some of the stuff that you gave me was hard. Hal Duncan's Testament, that was like, okay let's actually dig out the religious studies chops, and I could have gone on for about 30 more pages, but you know, there are deadlines.

But I don't really have time to do that work anymore, and that's a regret of mine because I think that it's super important, and also a deep joy to produce. I really love writing critique.

Kat Kourbeti: Did you put yourself forward for this, or were you asked to review stuff?

Arkady Martine: God, at this point, I cannot remember how that happened. I know how I ended up reviewing for NPR, which was Amal El Mohtar had a conflict of interest, and therefore suggested me, but I think I may have applied based on that. Like, my God, I wrote a review for NPR. Surely other people will let me do things.

Kat Kourbeti: I love reading what other writers think about books in a deep kind of engaged way, which I think the Strange Horizons review style is very much, "tell me what you think or what you feel or how that connects to other things" rather than, as you say, just a summary. It always gives me joy to see writers doing that, not just like folks who are not engaged with the craft themselves. Do you think that as a writer, do you engage with the books you read in a different way, because you know the craft, if you will?

Arkady Martine: You can't help not to, because I am a really craft oriented writer. I enjoy it. I actually enjoy the analysis part. Some of the deepest fun for me is reading a very good book that I'm having a wonderful time reading and being like, okay, so how did they do it? On a very technical level, like. How is this plot beat set up to cause this emotional reaction? Sometimes you can have a lovely experience of watching someone learn how to be really good. If you're reading a series that they wrote over time. I recently reread all of Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence, and Max is a friend. But I had read them, the first couple of them, when we didn't really know each other very well.

So I had this fantastic experience of watching my friend learn how to be really good. Like he was always good, but there's a point, like in the middle of his third novel, that maybe the two thirds mark where it suddenly clicks over and you see him learn how to do pacing, like live on the page. And I don't know if that's something that's accessible to people who don't write. And it doesn't have to be, like the books work without knowing that kind of thing, but it's part of the joy I get out of reading, is a kind of analytical examination.

Kat Kourbeti: So this reminds me actually, a long time ago, you and I were on a panel about learning how to write through writing fanfic. And you said something—

Arkady Martine: Was that in Helsinki?

Kat Kourbeti: Helsinki, yeah, a long time ago. You said something then that I have taken with me and I have been disseminating to the masses whenever I can, that "we each as a writer get one thing for free."

Arkady Martine: Oh, yeah, this isn't mine.

Kat Kourbeti: Haha, see, whoever you got it from lives on in me.

Arkady Martine: Good. I got it from the people who were teaching Viable Paradise, the year I went to Viable Paradise, which include Elizabeth Bear, Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Steve Bruch, but that was like a common metaphor that they use to help students recognize both their own talents and their own areas of weakness.

Which all writers have both, and it's equally useful for me. I'm glad that you repeat it because I love that one. It's the thing you get in the box. Everybody has at least one thing.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. Yeah. And I remember you said that yours was setting.

Arkady Martine: Yep, still is. Still deeply annoying because I can write you pretty buildings for ever on cue, five cents a building, but there is still, 10 years on in a fairly successful career as a writer, the idea of pulling an entire story out of thin air and creating a plot with momentum, is terrifying every time. I'm not good at it.

Kat Kourbeti: I've always said my free thing is characters. I can come up with people and their motivations and their backgrounds and all of that. Super easy. But setting actually really scares me, which is why I don't really do secondary world things. And it's the sort of thing that I have to work at a lot, but I always think of you and I talk about that piece of advice because it helps a lot of people get out of their own head about stuff.

Arkady Martine: Yeah, it does because you don't have to be good at everything.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, and you can't, and that's okay, but you're good at something. Start from there, and that's—

Arkady Martine: Find out what that is and start from there.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. So in the decade that's come since your first publication with Strange Horizons, there's been a lot more short fiction, which you can talk a little bit about if you want. I don't want to make you pick your favorite child, but you can tell me a little bit about your short fiction in general, if you like.

Arkady Martine: Sure. Do I have favorite children? Yes, because every writer has favorite children. I think my favorite short fiction children are probably the ones where I have been as experimental as I know I can be and pulled it off. So, one of the stories in Strange Horizons is really experimental, though it's not my favorite of the two.

My favorite of the two is City of Salt, because I've been carrying that place, and those three people around since, like, college, in various versions. Sometimes you get to write the people you made up for, like, an RPG in 2005, in a completely different version where they are unrecognizable from their original state, but that you love very much and have carried around with you.

Arkady Martine: I really like the ability of short fiction to let me do formalist and experimental things. Recently, my most recent short story, which is in Uncanny Magazine, is half of an academic article and half a commentary on, like, RPGs, mass multiplayer RPGs, and half a commentary on writing during a genocide. So that's three halves, which is probably as many halves as that story deserves.

But my other favorites have also been pretty experimental form-wise. I love the intensity of short fiction, and some of the games you can play. I have a story in a collection called The Mythic Dream, which came out from Saga a while ago, which is a retelling of a Sumerian myth in space opera format. And it's actually a very Strange Horizons story, and had it not been commissioned for that magazine, I probably would have submitted it. But it's also, like, me trying to figure out if I can do the translation from fragmentary Sumerian poetry that is extremely filthy to somewhat not fragmentary, but still fairly fragmentary, modern short story, which doesn't stop being extremely filthy. I read it aloud once at ReaderCon and I cannot believe I did it.

Kat Kourbeti: I love that though. Oh, what a room to be in.

Arkady Martine: Well, it was sufficiently late at night and I was like, "Oh my God, if I don't try it, I will never know if I can say these things that I wrote down, but out loud, to strangers."

There were no children, it was fine.

Kat Kourbeti: Well, there you go. And then of course, you know, the bigger success, certainly awards-wise has come with your novels. What was it like coming up with this incredible world? We have talked a little bit about the background of it, but the coming up with your free thing in the box, your setting. Tell me a little bit about the Teixcalaan Empire.

Arkady Martine: Teixcalaan is so easy to write. I wrote the empire that would seduce me. Just straight up, that is exactly what I did. I wrote the one that would get me. The one that would make me break my own ethics because it's the nastiest one I can come up with. It probably wouldn't break other people, but it would break me.

But it was also easy to write because a lot of it, a lot of it is space Byzantium, but it's also some other stuff. There's a lot of American imperialism in there. There's a lot of Mexica imperialism in there. People think there's Imperial China, but there really isn't. Other people have civil service exams, guys. That culture formation happens a lot. It's a very sensible way of sorting people into classes. And large bureaucracies love to do that.

It was the first novel I'd ever written. I have a couple of, wouldn't even call them trunk novels, abortive juvenilia from my early twenties. Never longer than like 15 K, like I could not do it. And I wrote Memory because I was tired of being a person who hadn't written a novel, which is a weird reason to write a novel. I'd also just finished my dissertation and possibly I was worried that if I didn't have an enormous project, something would go wrong.

So writing novels is very difficult for me. I find short stories much easier. I would call myself a short story writer, if I was classifying people into short story writers and novel writers. Novels have too many words, they go on for a very long time, and they cannot be as dense as I feel like all stories should be, because readers get very tired if you do that to them. So to get myself through writing a novel, I told myself I could put in all the things I liked. So I put in giant cities and people who communicate in a language of flowers and fashion and architecture and citation culture and poetry battles. And a lot of it was just, these are the things I always want to see in space empires, and they're never there because a lot of the tradition—they're not never there, they have rarely been there. A lot of the Anglophone science fiction tradition comes out of writing space opera as a kind of military history, military science fiction. I like military science fiction. The second Teixcalaan book is a extremely dull military science fiction novel or a rather exciting spy novel, depending on how you look at it.

But I always wanted the, "and what were they wearing when they did the fascinating political thing in the back room?" So that's what I made. I used the raw material of having thought very hard about imperialism and assimilation for a decade, and there was a lot of raw material, there still is.

Kat Kourbeti: I'm probably in the opposite field where, like, you're comfortable writing short and writing long is difficult, whereas I can't keep things short to save my actual life.

I started a short story a few years back for my writers group. We do this, like, contest every year, and I was like, yeah, I've got this idea, you know, 5,000 words, no problem.

I blow past the 5,000 word mark and I haven't even introduced like the theme that we were writing about. And I'm like. "Oh, no. I've made a mistake."

Arkady Martine: Yes.

Kat Kourbeti: That's kind of the story of my life. So I always admire greatly folks who can keep things short and punchy and full of meaning and feeling. And it's contained. Witchcraft.

Arkady Martine: Well, the nice thing about short stories is that you are not obligated to explain yourself. In a novel, you really do have to, and that is still something that, I will probably always be figuring out how I want to do that. The line between accessibility and complexity. Because I do want people to read what I write and enjoy it and have access to it.

But at the same time, I think I'm a relatively uncompromising writer. I'm not terribly interested in markets or having things be easy.

Kat Kourbeti: And yet, somehow, that has never been a problem.

Arkady Martine: I don't know. Okay? I really don't know. I thought the book was good enough to sell. Which is why I tried to query it. But I expected a very enthusiastic cult following about 500 people, ever. That is not what happened. I don't know why.

Kat Kourbeti: Think we were all just hungry for that kind of complexity, and that passion with which you approach that whole world, I think is very evident. And so I think that's what we wanted. That's what we always want. We just want a good story and a good world.

I wanted to ask a little bit about your latest, well, novella that's just been announced that will be re-published or rather, re-released, Rose/House.

Arkady Martine: Yeah, Tor is re-releasing it. It was originally with Subterranean Press. It did a limited edition, very gorgeous limited edition. And now Tor is releasing it widely. It'll be out in actual hard copy in most bookstores in March of 2025, and in ebook in November of this year, 24. And that's lovely.

And I, again, unexpected and delightful that Tor was interested in doing that. But, Rose/House is my weird art house book. "Art house" only slightly a pun. It's a locked room horror mystery with deserts and strong AI, that has nothing to do with the kinds of AI people talk about, and I have very little interest in talking about the kinds of AI that exists currently.

Rose/House is an alien that happens to be made out of computers. But then most of my work in some ways is interested in otherwise minds. So Rose House is one of those. It's really a book about what happens when I thought about Raymond Chandler and the Haunting of Hill House at the same time.

Kat Kourbeti: Ooh.

Arkady Martine: Plus a bunch of very weird architects, because I did a second degree in urban planning and therefore I read a whole bunch of really weird architects and planners and designers and people who think up cities that cause the people who live in them to behave in certain ways. There's a whole modernist movement in urban planning, Le Corbusier and people like that. Believing very strongly and those beliefs persist in some pervasive groundwater-y type ways in modern Western thinking, about how cities work and how zoning works and how people live. That if you change someone's environment you change their behavior, which is true, but not predictable. So putting everyone in little suburban houses definitely does things, but it does not necessarily reduce crime, which is the Victorian idea of garden cities is that if you reduce density, you're going to reduce crime and indigents, which is completely wrong.

If you raise wages and let people join unions, you reduce crime and indigents. Density has nothing to do with it, but urban planning is one of those grand imperial projects that doesn't get thought about as imperial. And I am very interested in the built environment, in infrastructure, in how people interact with the places they live in and around. And Rose/House is all of that just in a very creepy way. And some probably unpleasant thoughts about mentorship and art.

Kat Kourbeti: Ooh. I'm very interested in how this is almost like a little Venn diagram of your writing world and your non writing world, closing in together a little bit.

Arkady Martine: All of my work is that. People have asked me why I haven't quit my day job, any of the day jobs I've had. Currently, I work at a non governmental organization where my job is basically to yell at utilities and also public regulation commissions to make them, you know, have more renewable energy on the grid. That's a very simple version of a very complicated thing. Previous versions have been "do policy for a state energy agency" or "be a Byzantinist and do research and teach people about medieval imperialism and the apocalyptic".

I continuously refuse to quit my day jobs because it is where I get good ideas, and also because I like being in the world. I'd probably write faster without one, but I am not entirely sure that would be true. I need to be obsessed with things to write about them. And I've been lucky enough that a lot of the work I have done for pay has been in fields and doing things that I find deeply compelling.

Kat Kourbeti: I think that's fantastic. And just a very interesting place to be, because a lot of writers tend to get into publishing jobs, which are fine, but they're not necessarily like 'part of the world', as you say. And so seeing what writers whose non writing life is very different, where you've got like other things going on.

Arkady Martine: I do things that don't have to do with books. I think as a writer, I wouldn't—I mean, I've thought about, occasionally thought about like running a magazine because I like curation, but that's more of a, "I like curation so I want to make an exhibit", not "I want to do this as a career". As a writer, I want to write, not work on writing, if that makes sense. I actually felt this way as an academic, too, that one of the reasons I switched careers instead of staying in a university but not doing the pure research with a small amount of teaching that I really wanted to do, was that I'm not great at being support for something that I could be doing.

I think that different people react differently to that. Like sometimes some people seem to get a lot out of just being around and being part of the thing that they are also making. I know editors who are writers and vice versa.

Kat Kourbeti: I think I'm a little bit the same as you in that I really early realized that I don't think I want to work in publishing. I had an internship and I was like, this is fine, but I'd rather write than do all of this other stuff, and then I got into working in theater, and so I'm doing this now. But I do like that it doesn't have to do with writing or like with science fiction and stuff.

Arkady Martine: It's useful to have space, space inside your head to write actually. Having other things going on.

Kat Kourbeti: Hmm. Yeah. I just find it really fascinating. And you've done all of these degrees and stuff, like, how do you see yourself? Obviously, you can't sit still very long.

Arkady Martine: Yeah. I hate being bored. I come from a family of people who made weird and interesting and sideways career shifts. My grandfather was a chemical engineer who then became a lawyer, in a completely different field. And most of the rest of my family are musicians. So I'm bad at being still.

Kat Kourbeti: I think that's good, probably. I admire it anyway.

Thank you so much for taking the time and walking me through your career trajectory. You've got so much rich worlds to explore. I'll link all of the stuff in the show notes for people to have a perusal and to read some of your short fiction that perhaps they might've not seen.

Is there anything else you would like to plug while you're here?

Arkady Martine: I mean, Rose/House basically. If you did not get a chance to read it in the limited edition, I hope that the wide release finds you, and finds you interested in getting trapped in a desert.

Kat Kourbeti: Spooky. I love it.

Arkady Martine: It's a good spooky.

Kat Kourbeti: Great. And where can people find you on social media? If that's a thing you do?

Arkady Martine: It is. I am mostly on BlueSky as @byzantienne.bsky.social. I should probably fix that at some point, but I'm fairly easy to find there. I'm no longer on Twitter. I have an Instagram, but forget to use it.

Kat Kourbeti: Very well, then we'll find you there. Thank you so much for spending your time with us.

Arkady Martine: Thank you.​