Patty K. Rivera: Hi, listeners. I'm Audible editor Patty K. Rivera, and today I'm thrilled to be here with SenLinYu. Their collected online works have over 20 million individual downloads and have been translated into 23 languages. Today we're here to talk about their highly anticipated dark romantasy debut, , which has already been picked up for film adaptation. Congratulations and welcome, Sen.
SenLinYu: Thank you. I'm so excited to be here.
PR: Oh, I am thrilled. I'm overjoyed and thrilled to have you here. In Alchemised, you revisited Manacled and reinvented its worlds and characters, creating a meticulous and layered magic system. How did you shape the alchemy and “animancy” in Paladia to feel both scientific and fantastical?
SLY: Well, it really is where alchemy springs from. Alchemy was the science of the world for such a long time, and it was kind of held back from becoming chemistry, which is where it ended up ultimately. But when it initially was being practiced, it was very much an attempt to reconcile this sort of mystical understanding of the world with scientific observation. And so, when there were inconsistencies or things that they didn't understand, they would attribute that to the divine, to the mystical. Or if there were things that it was a contradiction of what they were observing, versus what they believed religiously, they would defer to the religious position or the religious understanding of something. And so, alchemy is inherently this mixture of this magical, fantastical, mystical, and, also, this very scientific thing being applied simultaneously. And there's sort of this constant dissonance, cognitive dissonance, intellectual distance that just naturally kind of occurs because of that.
PR: So, I'm glad that you touched on the magic because that definitely... We have the alchemy, we have the animancy, and we have, again, all these science elements that really do shine through. And what really stuck out to me—and I'm going to shift gears just a little bit here—was that it's not just those elements that feel so alive, but the magic itself, it feels so alive, and it definitely comes through in Spirefell.
Spirefell has this Gothic, looming presence that almost feels like another character. It's suffocating at times, but it also transforms who Helena is. Now, along with the alchemy and all the other elements, did you set out to make the house a character from the start, or did that role evolve as the story unfolded?
SLY: Yeah, I always knew that the house was going to be treated as a character. In the first part, I think of the house as being a character. And then in the second part, I think of the war as being its own character. And I try to treat each of those pieces that are kind of entities in a way as being something that drives the story forward. Gothic literature is very atmospheric. It's really taking the Romantic Era and then turning it into more: the feelings of terror, the feelings of fear. These really, really deep, visceral feelings environment is such an intrinsic part of the Gothic genre. It really played well with the psychological aspect of the story, because I find it so interesting to really enmesh a story in the POV of a particular character and how their perspective, their understanding of circumstances, et cetera, is very, very shaped by their mental state.
"I tend to lean more towards the Asian philosophy of Wabi-Sabi and Kintsugi, where it's repairing a broken bowl with gold and showing the cracks because that's where the personality and the uniqueness and the specific beauty comes from."
And so, getting to do that kind of psychological thriller element, but putting it into this Gothic genre—where the environment is supposed to be very reflective of the interiority of the character—it just really fed back into itself and just made everything feel a lot stronger because both things really complemented each other.
PR: They did. And because you talked about interiority: Helena, her interiority, especially in this house, she grapples with just leaving the room, and it becomes this thing where she almost... She's not restricted to her room. It is her initial thought process. As I was listening, I felt that fear that Helena had just to step into the house and get to explore it more, which is why I felt like I'm like, “Okay, this house is more than just a house for sure.” Helena, in general, is such a complex character. In the present, she feels haunted and cautious, and in the past, she's studious, self-sacrificing, and she's incredibly willing to take risks—even at great personal cost. How did you balance these two very different versions of her, while keeping her whole?
SLY: Well, a lot of that came from a feeling of that the characters who are sort of psychologically broken and damaged, they tend to be treated as irreparably harmed. And there's oftentimes almost this narrative of like, “Oh, this character's so broken, or this thing that happened to them is so bad that they should just die tragically for the sake of the narrative.” And I really wanted to push back on that because I feel like it's just so dismissive of people. There's so many people in the real world that are dealing with trauma that source from different places. And the idea that you would go through something and then, if you've gone through that thing, that it's just—your life is over; that scar is just something you'll never be able to move on from. And since it won't go away, it's better to just stop and give up or die then.
And that's always bothered me a lot. So, when I was writing this story, I wanted to show how incredible Helena was; how strong she was; how hard she fought to help these people, protect these people, save these people. And yet, there's no such thing as strength that cannot be broken. There is a breaking point for everybody, and Helena reaches that point, but that doesn't erase who she was. And that doesn't mean that she's no longer worthy of getting to survive or getting to have a life afterwards—because it will be a perfect life because it will have these fractures.
There's, culturally, a little bit sometimes—this idea of it “has to be perfect.” It has to be the dream. It has to be the perfect happily ever after or else it wasn't worth it. And I thinkI tend to lean more towards the Asian philosophy of Wabi-Sabi and Kintsugi, where it's repairing a broken bowl with gold and showing the cracks because that's where the personality and the uniqueness and the specific beauty comes from, is the things that have shaped you. And these things might define you in a way, but that is not all that you are. And so, wanting to not only show this isn't who Helena always was, she wasn't always afraid. She didn't have these fears originally. She was brought to this point because of the horrible things that she has had to endure. But then also say, but that does not mean that because she's reached that point that her life doesn't have any value anymore. She's been spent.
PR: I don't want to be too spoiler-y, but maybe there might be a spoiler in here. I noticed that, as I was listening, there are these moments where her past self—although her memories are gone—her past self just... It's trying to come out. Every time she tries to remember too hard, it's just like, “Oh, wait, there's that block.” And there's something about her that is courageous because she knows... To me, anyway, it felt like, “I need to remember.” And her own brain is stopping her from remembering. But then she's just willing to face the things that she forgot. And again, just like you mentioned, there is something beautiful in the brokenness. And I found those pieces of her, those moments where she was brave or where she would remember, she would just push herself a little bit harder, even while in captivity—there was real beauty in that.
And there's also something about—because you mentioned the beauty and broken things—there's something about her relationship with Kaine that just, it doesn't by no means starts off as something that is traditional romance. There's a meet cute, this is more like a meet-something. I don't have the word for it yet, but when we meet Kaine in the present, he seems completely in control. He's cold; he's commanding; he's almost untouchable as the High Reeve. But as the story continues, it reveals a very different man. He's fractured; he's closed off. He's sometimes cruel in his behavior, not only towards Helena, but towards his wife, towards his father, and yet we come to know that he's deeply driven by his devotion, by the pain, by some of the things that he's been through. I almost didn't want to root for him, but I'm just like, “Oh, he deserves happiness, too.” What makes Kaine so magnetic despite the fact that he's a walking contradiction?
SLY: He was such an interesting character to develop, and I very much developed him from a philosophical angle of he and Helena are sort of in this collision path of—he is this sort of philosophically nihilistic character. He has reached a point of despair and disillusionment where he sees no point. He does not see the future as, I think, something that he has any part in or that he has any responsibility towards. And so, he just becomes this sort of force of rage and destruction as a result of that. And he sort of becomes distilled into that almost exclusively. Whereas Helena is this character who she hits a similar point of disillusionment and sort of despair, and yet she chooses to create meaning instead of saying, “Oh, well, if there is no purpose; if the universe has no story for me; if there is no divine plan that's in place for me…” She doesn't say, “Well, I guess I will just give up then.” Instead, she chooses to create meaning in the work that she does and the effort that she makes.
There's the one scene where there's this conversation about how “the universe doesn't care,” and she says, “No, it does care, because I care, and I am part of the universe.”And so, she takes this more existential path of choosing to create meaning and persisting because of that, instead of needing this external validation or this belief in this larger narrative. She decides to forge her own path. And that's why she is, in many ways, able to evolve into the degrees and try to transmute over the course of this story. And she goes through all of these different cycles in that process. One of the motifs that I had in the story is that, in classical alchemy, there are four colors, and it starts: It's black, white, gold, and then red is the final color, final form in the transmutation process.
"There's this conversation about how 'the universe doesn't care,' and [Helena] says, 'No, it does care, because I care, and I am part of the universe.'"
So, Helena is in that final stage because she goes through this sort of destruction and this distillation and keeps letting herself evolve and creating the meaning herself, kind of that whole creating life, creating immortality, that sort of theme. Whereas Kaine: He sort of begins in this sort of black stage, and then he reaches the white stage, the whitening purification distillation period. But he doesn't feel any desire or drive to go beyond that. He doesn't choose to create meaning. He needs more of a light and a guidance in order to force himself to realize that the future is something that he is a part of, that he has a responsibility towards, that he has to live with the choices that he's made in the past when he didn't think it mattered. And so, it's this sort of ideological collision that occurs between them as these kind of entities that, ultimately, end up in different stages in that alchemical process.
PR: Interesting that you touched on that because they do butt heads a lot because he... I'm going to get spoiler-y. I don't want to, but there is that part where they're having the conversation about their future and about their child, and Helena has almost begged Kaine like, “Hey, be a part of our child's life.” And it creates this really intense moment between them, and it's not the only intense moment. There are several intense moments throughout the story with memory and history being so fragile, what's remembered and what's erased and what's rewritten. Why was it so important for you to explore who gets to control a story's narrative?
SLY: I mean, when I first started developing the story of Alchemised, that was sort of the story that I wanted to write. This idea of all of these things that we don't tend to want to address or confront in these narratives that we love to tell ourselves. One of the things that I studied when I was working on Alchemised was SPQR, which is Mary Beard's book on Rome. And one of the things that she touches on is the way that the Romans self-mythologize themselves based on their mythic origin of Romulus and Remus and what that said about them as a society. And then, because they just kept building on that, it became very definitive of the culture. So, the whole idea of the ways that societies self-mythologize themselves—their victories, their wars, the things that they define themselves as being—that was very much a major theme.
So, wanting to interrogate in that process of self-mythologizing, what are the things that we erase? Because we need it to be this simple black-and-white conflict of, “We were good; we had all these justifications.” The other side: “Wholly evil; we should kill them because they did all of these things that were so bad, but when we do them, it's understandable because we have this greater cause that we are supporting, that we are protecting, defending, et cetera.” So, I really, specifically, kind of wanted to tell a story that was looking at the underbelly of all the things intentionally hidden away.
And that started with a question about the ethics of spies and what is sort of the conflict, how do you reconcile as a spy? If you have to maintain your cover, how far do you go in order to do that? What specific atrocities might you commit in order to stay in the inner circle aware of all the things in order to hopefully, ultimately help topple it? But if you are complicit in all these things along the way, are you really redeemable? So that was the initial inspiration question that I had. And then, in the process of trying to wrestle with that sort of “ethical trolley problem,” I ended up thinking about, well, what are all the other things that we don't tend to want to deal with in the narrative war stories? Because we love a spy story as this really fun, buzzy, action-adventure, James Bond kind of thing. But that never... You don't really get into the terrible choices that a spy would have to make in order to maintain their cover because, in a movie or something about a spy, they’re always the good guy, the means justifies the ends, that kind of thing.
And so, I wanted to delve a lot more specifically into the ethical nuance of that. And so then, as I was trying to expand that into this fuller story, realizing all of these other things that get erased, all the labor, all of the effort, all of the things that are not defined as heroic. Then I started really interrogating what is defined as his heroism, and why is killing on the battlefield so heroic, but being a military doctor—a medic out in the battlefield and the same battlefield, but you are trying to save people—that scene is more of the coward's choice. That's the spineless person who couldn't bring themselves to kill somebody. So they're a healer; they're a medic. And what does that say about us as a society that one of those things is heroic, and the other one is regarded as weak and not so heroic.
And then, kind of stemming from that, the whole way in which that type of heroism is treated as something that shouldn't even need to be acknowledged, and that you should just want to do those things. That women, in particular, feminine-coded labor, women should just want to do those things, and they shouldn't expect acknowledgement or recognition for that. And yet, at the same time, we know that we have to acknowledge heroes, like military heroes, we need to make statues for them; we need to have parades for them. And there's no question of like, “Oh, well, they should just want to do that because it's good, heroic, and necessary.” That cognitive dissonance was something that I really wanted to lean into in the story.
*Spoilers ahead*
PR: Okay. So I'm glad you touched on that because, as you were answering the question, there's this one part that I was thinking about where Helena is speaking, and it's slipping my mind who she was speaking to, but she says that she's healing people who are going to go back out and essentially come back to see her. She's like, “I'm doing this over and over again.” And it's almost as if she's defending herself and the things she goes through to this person who is just like, “Oh, you are just a healer,” and kind of taking the heroism out of the work that she did and does during this war.
It's interesting that you touched on that, because it definitely does shine through that there are several moments in the story where she does have to defend what she does to these other people. And it actually leads me to what I was going to ask. Through their daughter, Enid—we are in total spoiler territory here, listeners. I'm very sorry; I'm doing a terrible job of keeping it spoiler-free—through their daughter, Enid, we see the weight of Helena and Kaine's story carried into the next generation. Enid searches for her mother in history books. And, at this point, it seems like there's almost a grieving that happens because Helena feels like a footnote. What did you want Enid's perspective to reveal about legacy and how their story is remembered?
SLY: Yeah, so with Enid, I wanted to lean into... I mean, obviously the story could have ended earlier than that, but it was really important for me to show the story and how war is not just this single-generation thing. It's not this thing that happened, and then the next generation just moves on from it. They are raised by the people that lived through that war. They may or may not be aware of the things that their parents went through, the horrible decisions that they were forced to make in order to survive. And those are not things that just vanished between generations. For me, on my maternal side, my grandparents were interned during World War II because they were Japanese. That was something that left a very deep psychological scar. My grandmother, she was 16 years old when she was basically put in the desert behind barbed wire and lived in these, kind of, “sheds” for several years.
"The whole idea of the ways that societies self-mythologize themselves—their victories, their wars, the things that they define themselves as being—that was very much a major theme."
And the trauma of that being uprooted from their home, losing pretty much everything they had and placed into these camps, she was an American citizen, but it didn't matter because she was Japanese. And so, growing up, hearing all these stories about World War II and the heroism and Normandy and all of these battles that people consider so important, but there was at the same time, this brushing off of the things that the US did that were discriminatory on their own of turning away the Jews that fled to America, in turning the Japanese and all of these different things. Those things are not really confronted at all in history.
But when you have descended from somebody who went through that, that's not something that you can just ignore; that's something that sort of haunts you. And so, I wanted to depict in Enid, on the one hand, there is this whole stepping into the future that this new generation has a chance to do these things that their parents never had the opportunity to because their parents basically got seized and reforged into these weapons of war. The rest of their lives, they lived through the ramifications of having been turned into these weapons. And so with the next generation, you see all of that lost potential. There's the Kate Bush “Soldier Boy” song [Editors note: The title of the song is "Army Dreamers"]. It's all about: he could have been a musician, could have been all these different things, but he joined the army and everything. And so kind of trying to show what could have been in a way, and it’s also showing that there's still the shadow of the war. It still looms. It does not just vanish after one generation.
PR: Oh, that's beautiful that you touched on that because it brings me to the scene where Enid is like, every time I talk to my mom, she has to... Her hands start to shake and her heart goes a little bit faster. And it definitely feels like Enid is going to... The story ends, right? But it feels like Enid is just, again, she's a product of her parents, and she's learning how to navigate having parents that were a part of this very, very brutal war.
All right, so the one thing that sticks out about Alchemised is just the length. Let's talk about the length. I will be the first to admit that when I first listened, I listened to the first 15 minutes, and I was just like, is this one performer? Can we confirm? Because Saskia Maarleveld delivers a performance that was just impeccable: 36 hours, 1,020 pages, Sen. Okay?
Saskia Maarleveld, like I said, she delivers a performance that's just impeccable. She not only captures all the raw and the heightened emotion of such a twisty and turny listen, but she offers such nuance to both characters. There's this one scene at the beginning of the story where Helena walks out into the hallway, and she starts breathing, and you just hear Saskia just—you can hear the fear in her voice. And I'm like, “Oh, Helena's really scared.” I can just... I'm there. I'm there in that really dark hallway. And I also want to turn around and run back into that room. How did it feel to listen to her performance? First part of the question. Second, was there a moment in her performance where you felt she revealed something new about Kaine or Helena?
SLY: I was so excited when going through the audition process and hearing the different voices, and Saskia was actually a narrator that I was already familiar with because I listened to a lot of audiobooks. And so I was so excited to hear her voice, hear her version of it. And there were so many different elements that I considered really, really important. And the fact that she met all of those different criteria, which just made her just the unquestionable choice. But then the thing that was really interesting is one of the things that I didn't hear in the audition—that I only heard after I received the audiobook—was that we had a conversation via email about how to do Kaine's voice, specifically, because I didn't want him to sound upper class, because I wanted his voice, the way his accent was done, to have that reminiscence to his family's working-class roots, that they were not these posh elites with this very snooty accent or anything like that.
And so, I'd heard her do Kaine's voice, but I actually didn't hear her do that iteration of his accent until I listened to the audiobook. And I was so just, absolutely, kind of, over the moon at how impeccably she captured it. It was very... I don't know if you've ever seen the movie North and South, which Richard Armitage is in. The way she did his voice, it was incredibly reminiscent of Richard Armitage's accent of that kind of working-class man, but who's become this factory owner. It was reminiscent of that to me, and I was like, “Yes, this is exactly captures so well, this particular nuance of the Farron family, that hey have all this wealth, and yet they are still ultimately this very recently moneyed working-class family."
PR: I knew you had to be an audio lover. I knew it.
SLY: Oh, yeah. No, it was really funny. I didn't realize how influential my audiobook listening was until I was having conversations with my editors about things. And because I listen to audiobooks, especially with fiction, I mostly do audiobooks. And so I will not ever have a glossary. I will never have a map or any of those types of things. I don't get to reference any of that. And so, if a book just assumes that I know the meaning of a word, and it doesn't bother to give you context to extrapolate what it must be, or it doesn't explain it in the text, I just will not know that. I realized when I was working on Alchemised, like I was very resistant to the idea of having a glossary. I wanted to put the terms into the manuscript, and I wanted there to be context.
"My grandparents were interned during World War II because they were Japanese. That was something that left a very deep psychological scar."
I wanted there to be etymological hints of what those words meant. And then I wanted there to potentially be an explanation in the narrative of what it was. But I was very resistant to, at any point, having a word in there that you wouldn't have any context for unless you had a glossary to go to, because I have never had one, and I wanted the whole story to be in the manuscript. We did ultimately end up drawing a map so that people could look at that. But again, it was another thing where I was very much the only things that should be in the map should be things that are communicated in the book itself. There should not be anything there that is not information that the story does not also disclose.
PR: And you did an amazing job, by the way, because I walked into Alchemised like, “Oh, I know what a necromancer is. I know what an anime... No, I didn't. Not according to Sen, I didn't. Okay. I could talk to you about audios all day—now that I know you're an audio fan—but I'm going to keep going here. Paladia feels so fully realized. Do you ever imagine returning to this world again in your writing, or do you see Alchemised as a self-contained story?
SLY: I see Paladia as a pretty self-contained, concluded story. However, I did do a lot of worldbuilding beyond Paladia to create the sociopolitical tensions, and the element of these external countries looming over this civil war that Alchemised is centered around. And so, in the process of trying to get the story to just be 1,024 pages long, a lot of that was worldbuilding information and things that I developed that just never made it into the manuscript. So, I do have a few ideas for the world of Alchemised; it's that same universe, but it wouldn't be like Helena and Kaine's story that is concluded. It would be very much removed in a whole other country. But sort of getting to explore some of the political ideas and the impacts of being in a world with alchemy, but in a different context than Paladia's specific alchemy-centered society.
PR: I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait. I can't wait! I'm here celebrating. I'm here celebrating your new one. We're still celebrating this one. Okay. All right, now a fun one. A fun question: If Helena could recommend an Audible listen to me, what would it be?
SLY: Oh, gosh. I think, well, I just talked about this last night actually at the release party, but I just recently read the book, Dogs of War by Adrian Tchaikovsky. And I think that Helena would really enjoy that because it also... It is a story that wrestles with the ethics of war and the idea of the society trying to figure out these ways to create weapons that don't endanger themselves, but that also that it ends up resulting in other really horrific forms of exploitation. So, I just recently listened to that. It was such an incredible journey, and I think that it would be a story that Helena would be passionate about too.
PR: Okay, now that sounds like it's going to get me out of this book hangover that I'm currently experiencing All right, Sen, it has been beyond wonderful speaking with you today. I hope you have an amazing release week and tour.
SLY : Thank you.
PR: Listeners, you can get SenLinYu’s debut, Alchemised, on Audible now. Happy listening.
