Emily Tesh is a UK-based author of science fiction and fantasy. Her debut novel, Some Desperate Glory, won the Hugo Award for Best Novel. Tesh is also a winner of the Astounding Award, and the author of the World Fantasy Award-winning Greenhollow duology.
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| Emily Tesh photo by Olav Rokne |
1. For those readers not familiar with you, please introduce yourself.
I’m Emily Tesh, I live in the UK, and I’m an award-winning author of speculative fiction. I can’t be more specific than ‘speculative’ because what I actually write is all over the genre shop. My first books were a pair of romantic historical fantasy novellas, the Greenhollow Duology; the first one, Silver in the Wood, won a World Fantasy Award. Then I wrote a high-speed action-packed space opera about fascist indoctrination for my debut novel—Some Desperate Glory. That one won a Hugo. And my latest book is something completely different again.
2. We’re here to talk about The Incandescent, please give us a brief overview of the book for our readers.
My latest book, The Incandescent, is about being a teacher of magic in a posh boarding school beset by demons. It’s not quite urban fantasy—I’ve been calling it Home Counties fantasy. It’s set in a fancy school in Buckinghamshire, which is not a real place, but recognisably a cousin of several real places. My American editor read the first act and told me that American readers would probably experience this book as pure fantasy. It’s not. It’s the most meticulously true-to-life book I’ve ever written. Parts of it are semi-autobiography. I had tremendous fun writing it.
3. After your wildly successful award winning SF novel Some Desperate Glory, what drew you back to writing fantasy again?
I never really left writing fantasy. Science fiction is a useful shorthand for a certain set of concerns within genre fiction, but I see it as primarily an aesthetic—particularly in the corner of science fiction I was playing with, which is space opera. I am interested in the aesthetic worlds of genre fiction. I often see readers and writers talking about originality—as in, what original worldbuilding, what an original concept—but I don’t find originality interesting at all. Any idiot can have a new idea. What I do find compelling is the subgeneric worlds that people are drawn back to again and again, with minute variations: here’s a ravaged landscape, with wizards and monsters lurking in it, and your destiny somewhere on the far side. Here’s nineteenth-century England as refracted through the lens of Georgette Heyer, populated almost exclusively by brooding dukes. Here’s galactic civilisation, don’t worry too much about how the spaceships work. And, of course, here’s magic school.
The thing that interests me about these collective generic worlds is their unoriginality. They belong to genre fiction as a whole. (Can I use the word megatext? These are the aesthetic worlds of the megatext!) Writers of SFF can use them or refuse them, but we cannot escape them. Terry Pratchett put it well when he described the role of Tolkien in fantasy fiction as rather like Mount Fuji in Japanese art: always there in the background, or if you refuse to put it there, that’s a choice with meaning too. I also find this a useful way as well to distinguish between genre speculative fiction and literary speculative fiction—the literary end of the SFF pool is mostly less interested in these shared aesthetic worlds.
This is all a rather long-winded way to say that I finished writing a space opera and decided to write magical school next, and to me this was no more surprising than going from historical romance to space opera. You say what you have to say and move on. Each of these aesthetic worlds is its own conversation and its own set of interests. To me the concerns of contemporary space opera are empire, violence, and complicity. Magical school is about privilege, merit, and hierarchy.
4. You’ve described The Incandescent as “ a book about money and education and status symbols, about loving your career, about demons, about magic, about fantasy school - but most of all about how 'school' is always a kind of fantasy” and I would love to unpack that further.
a. There are a lot of magic fantasy school novels and stories, but nearly all of them use the students as some of, often all of the point of view characters. What prompted you to make Doctor Walden as your point of view character for the vast majority of the book?
Well, I was tired of reading books about school written by people who don’t know anything about school! This is the torment of any reader with a specialist area of knowledge. My partner, a barrister, cannot watch courtroom dramas without picking apart every error of law and procedure. I spent a decade as a schoolteacher and now I am irritating about safeguarding policies.
Of course, students make a very natural entry point to a story set in a school. Most people have been students in a school at some point in their lives, so there’s some personal experience to draw on for the structure and sensory experience of that life. And it’s an easy exposition shortcut: you need these characters to know something? Give them a lesson about it! There are the built-in tensions associated with hierarchy, secrecy, rebellion: the adults have all the power and you have none, so the adults must not find out what you are doing, or you will be punished... this is simple fodder for plot incidents. But above all, the student—the young adult—is the natural focus of a bildungsroman. Discover the world, discover your own identity, discover your own power to change the world… this story has been told many times and it is a classic for a reason.
A teacher’s experience of school is completely different to the experience of a student, in a way I find tremendously funny. On the one hand, here are human beings in the most volatile and emotional stage of their lives, having high-stakes experiences that will shape them forever. When a teenager tells you this is the worst day of my life! it is entirely possible that they are completely serious and literally correct. They haven’t had that many days yet. So there they are! And then there’s you, standing next to these bundles of drama and emotion and meaning. And you’re at work. This is a normal day for you. You’re just getting on with your job and drinking tea. You become a background character in the bildungsroman drama unfolding all around you: one adult, and twenty to thirty protagonists per classroom.
And it’s very natural, if you’ve never been that adult, not to think much about who your teachers are or what they do when they aren’t being a background character in your life. Much of the work in a teaching job happens outside the classroom and a solid chunk of it is totally invisible to most students. But I have noticed that in a lot of magic school stories, the adults are not doing their jobs. They do the visible-to-students bit—they show up, provide educational exposition, scold the protagonists for misbehaviour (this is usually unjust, protagonists generally being right about everything), and perhaps provide some support to our hero if they’re the nice kind of teacher—but despite this, nearly all of them should be fired for catastrophic failures in safeguarding. In a school where the adult staff are fulfilling their moral, professional, and legal responsibilities, it should be totally impossible for any child to have any kind of fantasy adventure.
So I thought of that. And then I thought of Dr Walden, whose job as Director of Magic at Chetwood School boils down to ‘prevent six hundred children from having fantasy adventures.’ I think that if teenagers could really do magic, you would absolutely need someone whose full-time job was to write risk assessments and banish demons and develop lesson plans for arcane safety classes. You’d need to ward the vape detectors in the school toilets and confiscate possessed mobile phones. You would need codes of sorcerous conduct. You would need annual magical incident training. You would need policies.
In short, you would need all the things which are missing from a student-eye version of a school story. Those contain only what the students experience, and student experience is the tip of a large institutional iceberg.
b. Chetwood School is a location and setting for the novel that really makes the school and its buildings characters of its own, from Walden’s office next to the engines, to the student dormitories. What were your influences and inspirations in building up the campus?
Chetwood doesn’t exist. But a lot of schools like it do. A friend of mine was a boarder at Wells Cathedral School, the oldest school in England—it was founded in 909 AD. The school is so old that it is inextricably intertwined with the city of Wells. There’s no such thing as a campus when your whole town is a campus. I borrowed bits of Chetwood’s architecture from there. I also stole things from the University of Cambridge, where I was an undergraduate—especially the giant Brutalist dormitory, which is based on the first-year student accommodation which you could only access by cutting through a beautiful mediaeval quadrangle. That mishmash of monumental mediaeval architecture with later brick and concrete buildings in varying levels of ugliness feels like the essence of an ancient educational institution to me. When I was a teenager I did a summer course in Ancient Greek hosted at Bryanston School in Dorset—a splendidly hideous Victorian monster of a building—and I stole that one too. And the secondary school I went to years ago was mostly housed in a horrid 1970s concrete block, which grew like a kind of oblong fungus out of the remnants of a stately home that once belonged to a duke. (Schools, hotels and conference centres tend to be the final fate of these former stately homes, which are enormously expensive to run and mostly lack real historical interest.) While I was there, they broke ground for a new building. They spent a lot of money on it. It looked like someone had taken approximately three floors of an architecturally adventurous office block from London’s financial district and dumped it next to the netball courts. I imagine it’s horribly dated by now.
Chetwood borrows pieces of all of these. One of my favourite parts of the book is the map, created by Virginia Allyn, showing how the ancient and modern fabric of the school are intertwined. The architecture of a school both shapes and reflects the institution. This is the thread that runs through all my work across different SFF subgenres. I am interested in how people create environments and are in turn created by them.
c. Unlike a lot of magical school books, you take pains to make it clear that the school teaches all subjects, not just magical disciplines, but it's unusual enough that I noticed it. Why do it that way?
This was part of my general annoyance with magical school stories! If your imaginary school only teaches magic, then what, exactly, do you think school is for? Is a child who has learned magic and nothing else ready to function as an adult? Are they stuck doing only magic-adjacent careers forever because they haven’t done even the most basic qualifications in anything else? How did you avoid getting your school dinged by the inspectors on the grounds that it isn’t following the national curriculum? And hey, have these children done any relationship and sex education?
But really I think the magic-only curriculum is a sign of a common misunderstanding of education—so common that you hear it from high-level politicians sometimes—the idea that education is the same thing as training. This supposes that school exists to train you in how to do a specific set of things in preparation for your real life. Perhaps it will train you in sciences and mathematics, and then you will become an engineer. Perhaps it will train you in languages and you will become a diplomat. Everything you do in school must have a use and a purpose, otherwise it is—horror of horrors—a waste of time; and worse, a waste of money. So naturally a magical school should focus on training you in how to be a magician.
But schools don’t exist to train children for careers. Schools exist to transform children into educated people. Dr Walden gets the utilitarian question at one point in the book—what would we use this for?—when her students are doing a particularly difficult and esoteric piece of academic magic. And the answer, the real answer, is: we are using it right now, to turn you into the kind of person who is undaunted by complex, high-stakes brain work. The point of education is not to train you in a particular set of skills, but to give you the habits of mind which make it possible to acquire almost any skill. These are also the habits of mind which help a person become an informed, capable, and proactive citizen of the world. In short, the students at Chetwood do science and maths and English and history and modern languages along with their magic lessons, because Chetwood is—as closely as I could make it—a real and serious school, attempting to provide its students with an actual education.
There’s a cynical answer I can give alongside this idealistic one. Chetwood is a posh school. It’s a private boarding school and it costs a lot of money. And the purpose of fancy schools like this is not just to provide an education, but also to act as an investment. The school says: pay us and we will supply your children with the cultural capital they need to become members of the elite. So if Chetwood wants to attract the kind of parents who can pay fifty thousand pounds a year, it needs to supply a similar education to other schools which also cost fifty thousand pounds a year. That means a broad liberal education, heavy on the academics, noticeably light on practicalities, and carefully tailored so that every child has covered at least the minimum requirements for applying to Oxford or Cambridge.
Magic is an extra. This is education as a route to power, and you don’t need magic to be powerful.
d. Some of my favorite parts of the book were the visits to the demonic realm and what we see there. What were your touchstones in designing the demonic otherworld?
The demonic realm is imagined as a parallel universe which overlaps the mundane world. At Chetwood School, it looks like Chetwood School—but the demonic version of Chetwood reflects not just the school as is but also the school as it has been. All the history of the place exists at once in this realm which is outside ordinary time. So Walden can see pre-Reformation stained glass in the fourteenth-century chapel, or a long lost kitchen garden from a farmhouse that no longer exists. She also encounters the memories of people who have been part of the institution over its long history—the memories, and sometimes the ghosts.
This is a frightfully unsubtle metaphor, of course. An institution is not just its contemporary incarnation but also the sum of all its previous forms. I nearly wrote all its previous selves there, which is fair enough, because Chetwood School is really one of the major characters in this book. But previous selves are a core question haunting Dr Walden, whose own past identities exist in Chetwood’s history as child, student, and terrible failure. The demonic realm presents an opportunity to encounter the past as it haunts the present.
5. A terrible movie I have an affection for has a bit of controversial wisdom from a minor walk-on role character, that everything in life after school is just school in a different name and guise. Given the path that Doctor Walden takes and the structure of the book, I’d like your thoughts on the parallels between Walden’s life as Doctor of Magic versus that of her students (or just students in general in Chetwood) and the theme of the fantastic otherworldly nature of school as an overarching theme of the novel.
6. The magic in this book, being a discipline and systematized, is very different than the much more pastoral magic in The Greenhollow Duology. What were the challenges and opportunities in creating a much more outwardly rigorous and formalized magic system for the novel?
I always knew that Walden’s approach to magic was an academic one. Rather than try to design an entire academic discipline from scratch—this struck me as doomed, as it generally takes scholars several centuries to create an academic discipline, and the goal of this book was always meticulous realism—I took some academic strands that already exist and made them magical. First, ‘magic’ could mean an enormous number of things, so I divided it into three arbitrary categories—rather as students who wish to learn about the world around them must study three categories of science. So magic in The Incandescent is broadly divided into Instantiation (doing magic with stuff), Evocation (doing magic yourself), and Invocation (doing magic with demons). Or, as I thought of them, Danger Design and Technology, Danger Sports, and Danger Latin.
I spent by far the most time thinking about Invocation, since that’s Dr Walden’s discipline. The part I borrowed from my own time as a Latin teacher was the focus on meticulous systems of rules worked out by someone else. But at the same time, magic is a way of comprehending and acting on the world around you, and I felt that in the modern world it would be almost impossible to avoid treating it as a branch of the sciences. In thinking about academic science, I ran again into the tension between scholarship for its own sake and scholarship as means to an end. Dr Walden is a very good scholar who has chosen a career where her skill as a magician is less important than her ability to manage a roomful of teenagers. I was interested in the hows and whys of that decision—especially thinking of science teachers I have known, many of whom took substantial paycuts to work in education. To be a decent teacher you need a good degree and social skills, and a person with a good STEM degree and social skills has a lot of higher-status and better-paid options open to them than the classroom.
So I would say I was less interested in creating a rigorous and formal magic system than in the consequences of such a system. If it were possible to predictably summon gigantic and deadly demons, how quickly would the academic discipline of demon-summoning become a servant to military technology? Who would be doing this research and why would they agree to do it? How would children learn about it, and what would be the results of teaching basic demon-summoning to children? If any human being can reach for terrible power at any time, how do you deal with the outcome?
Any actual rigour or formality in the book is an artful illusion. I am not capable of inventing the science of magic from scratch, even if I wanted to. To study science is to investigate the truth according to a particular epistemological understanding of what truth is and how it can be determined. Fictional, magical science is intentionally unreal; it uses the trappings of scientific truth as an aesthetic signal about how we should understand the role of magic in a fantastical world. So the scientific magic that Dr Walden does is an aesthetic creation—with some elements borrowed from life, and the rest pure smoke and mirrors.
(That was a lot of words to say that I think ‘hard’ magic systems are a bit silly and I do not exempt my own book from this opinion.)
7. Given that this novel is in dialogue with mundane British school novels (of which I am not terribly read) as well as the fantastic ones I have read, I was wondering about any more thoughts about how your book fits into the English School Story Tradition.
One early reader told me: this isn’t dark academia, it’s a school story! And I think that reading is completely correct. My original manuscript has the title as ‘The Incandescent: A School Story’, and I am still a little sad that my publisher didn’t let me get away with this for the final version. The school story is a staple of English children’s literature. The ur-example is Tom Brown’s School Days by Tom Hughes, a semi-autobiography based on the author’s own days at Rugby School. It was published in 1857, over a century and a half ago, and it is not widely read now, but it was very influential in its time—so much so that adults have been inflicting school stories on children ever since. As a child I read widely in the genre, especially Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers books, first published in 1947—already nearly a century after Tom Brown. Of course, authors like Enid Blyton and Angela Brazil were not playing the classic school story straight. They took the traditional themes thought suitable and inspiring for young men—friendship, honour, and loyalty in a single-sex peer group—and applied them to girls’ schools. At the time Tom Hughes and his imitators were writing, girls’ boarding schools barely existed. So these 1940s books are already a subversive feminist remix of a children’s literary tradition, albeit in a way that is almost invisible to contemporary readers. Blyton seems very dated to us.
The genre is so old that it has been reworked, remixed, parodied, played straight again, and crossed over with plenty of other literary traditions. George Fraser MacDonald’s Flashman series takes the schoolboy bully villain from Tom Brown’s School Days and follows his horrifyingly successful career as colonial military hero, Victorian success story, and serial rapist. MacDonald has a very clear-eyed view of the way the nineteenth-century English boys’ boarding school served to create the British Empire’s officers and administrators. Flashman is also a pointedly cynical take on a certain kind of popular serialised military history fiction—a dark Sharpe, perhaps. Meanwhile an early John le Carré sends his spy protagonist George Smiley back to school to invesigate a murder among the staff, mixing the tradition of autobiographical school setting with the worlds of crime and spy fiction. So these are adult reflections on the school story, set in the adult world. As well as these, quite naturally, you get the school story crossed with another great staple of British children’s literature—the fantasy novel. It’s a natural fit: hence Jill Murphy’s wildly successful 1974 novel The Worst Witch (first of a popular eight-book series, filmed multiple times since the 1980s, much beloved and still in print), or Diana Wynne Jones’ rather more disturbing 1982 take on a school full of magic, Witch Week.
So The Incandescent is doing nothing new when it looks at school with adult eyes, and any SFF reader can think of plenty of examples of magical school from a student perspective. I think the core of the school story is that the school has to be a major character—and, furthermore, that the school has to be a composite character: membership of the institution is what defines the individual characters, and the behaviour of those characters is what defines the institution. I was interested in writing about Chetwood School as institution, in its stability and endurance over the centuries—in how places change or remain changeless, and in how human beings change or remain changeless within them.
8. Finally, what’s next for you? After a well deserved Hugo win (again, congratulations) and now a really interesting take on the magical school subgenre, what are you working on next?
I have described the book I am currently working on variously as ‘the kissing book’, ‘the one with sad immortals’, and ‘undead transgender Patrochilles Minecraft’. I have yet to figure out an official pitch but I think that just about covers the vibe.
Thank you, Emily!