Writing

Aliette de Bodard was born in the US, but grew up in France (in the gorgeous city of Paris, to be precise). Although French is her mother tongue, her parents insisted early on that she learn to speak English.

She first discovered SF through the works of Isaac Asimov, and then moved to fantasy when she happened upon a copy of Ursula Le Guin’s “The Earthsea Quartet”, which today remains one of her favorite books in the genre. She decided to write when her family moved to London for a few years: she found a copy of Orson Scott Card’s “How to Write Fantasy and Science Fiction”, which first made her realise that she could try her hand at writing.

She studied in Paris in a classe préparatoire, a prep course for the competitive exams which would enable her to enter an engineering school. After two years of intensive classes, Aliette was admitted into Ecole Polytechnique, one of France’s top engineering schools. During her class préparatoire, she started writing regularly, which enabled her to find a distraction from science. She completed two novels during her studies.

Halfway through Ecole Polytechnique, she started writing short stories instead of novels, in order to improve faster–and went on writing those after she graduated.

In June 2006, Aliette attended Orson Scott Card’s Literary Bootcamp, which enabled her to sharpen her skills, as well as come back with a wealth of information about the craft and the business of writing.

Her writing took off after she won the Writers of the Future contest and got picked out of Interzone’s slushpile by the inimitable Jetse de Vries; this marked the beginning of a growing number of sales, out of which several were made to semi-professional or professional markets. She was able to join SFWA as an Active Member in 2008, and became a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2009, narrowly losing to David Anthony Durham.

Her first novel, Servant of the Underworld sold to HarperCollins imprint Angry Robot following a lucky break involving an agent, an editor and a delayed flight (see full story here at the Angry Robot website).

Servant of the Underworld is a cross between a historical Aztec fantasy and a murder-mystery, featuring ghostly jaguars, bloodthirsty gods and fingernail-eating monsters. For more information, see the novels webpage.

Aliette is currently working on the sequel to Servant of the Underworld (more hungry ghosts, more blood, and more magic).

 

Engineering

When not writing, Aliette works for a defence company where she does image processing, also known as the art of teaching a computer to see things.

It’s not as obvious as it looks like, mainly because computers are abysmally bad at some things (like detecting familiar shapes). She also does signal processing, which is teaching a computer to recognise some patterns in signals like audio, radar…It actually requires a pretty advanced level in mathematics (probabilities, optimization and such).

Aliette admits to being a proud maths geek, though most of that hasn’t seeped into her fiction. She tends to focus more on culture, politics and religion than on the nitty-gritty side of science–probably because she needs to step away from her work when she writes.

 

The Asian side?

Aliette is half-Vietnamese, which is not necessarily obvious from the picture.  Her education was mainly Western, so the only thing she has retained is a love of Chinese/Vietnamese food, and an urge to introduce more non-Western cultures in her fantasy. This actually started with some Indian myths (after a humanitarian trip to India, during which she fell in love with the culture), then moved to Chinese and Aztec stuff. All of this enables her to indulge her love of mythology and of history as she writes.

To support this, she buys stacks of non-fiction books (a handy list of what she’s found most useful can be found here).

Want to know more?

Written in Blood

Aliette is a proud member of Written in Blood, a writing group founded by Clarion Alumnus Dario Ciriello in 2007. Since Written in Blood’s inception, several members of the group have gone on to sign book deals, break into professional print, and/or be nominated for awards such as the Sidewise Awards.

Cover of Eight Against Reality

The anthology “Eight Against Reality”, featuring writing from the Written In Blood members, will be published in October 2009 by Panverse Publishing.

(NB: WiB is a closed, invitation-only group and is not accepting new members)

Original Picture credits
Pigeon and Bridge: Vincent Boiteau
Computer Lab: quatro.sinko
Vittala picture: MysteryBee
(All pictures distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License)