Good day to you space travellers, today I’m delighted to share an Interview with Ren Hutchings. Ren is the author of the excellent twisty space time-travel book ‘Under Fortunate Stars’ which is OUT NOW in paperback!
Hi Ren and welcome to Spells & Spaceships! It’s a pleasure to have you here; Under Fortunate Stars is one of my all-time favourite sci-fi reads!
How would you describe Under Fortunate Stars within the confines of a single sentence, for people who haven’t heard about it yet?
A space opera about accidental time travel, a history nerd to the rescue, and the perils of actually meeting your heroes!
The overwhelming impression at the forefront of my mind, some time after finishing the book, is the strength of the characters. Did you have a full idea who the main characters of your story were before you began writing the plot?
I’m very much a character-first writer, so the characters and their personal journeys existed in quite a lot of complexity before most of the smaller plot details filled in. Some of the side characters changed more than others (and a few of them merged, because the cast used to be a little bit bigger!) but the main players stayed fairly constant through all the drafts and revisions.
Uma is a lifelong history nerd who gets a chance to meet the historical figures she’s been interested in her whole life. Jereth is a wise-cracking smuggler with a lot of emotional baggage under the surface. Eldric is a cynical, pessimistic professor faced with the revelation that he’s meant to become a legendary peace hero. And Shaan is a disgruntled administrator who’s more worried about her own shadowy past coming to light. These POV characters have very much been who they are from the start!
What has also stuck with me is just how attached I was able to become to these characters and how intrigued I was by The Fortunate Five. The poll you ran for readers’ favourite character on twitter was almost equal between all 4 you listed! Is it a conscious and deliberate part of your writing to make sure these characters have that pull, that ability to resonate with people?
I’ve been really delighted by the fact that different readers connect with each of the POVs and have different favourites. It was definitely a conscious decision to make all their voices as distinct as possible. When you’re writing a multi-POV story, it’s really important that each character brings something unique to the tapestry of the narrative.
All the main characters also go on pretty intense emotional journeys. They’re all dealing with grief in different ways, and grappling with things that happened in their past. So I think that some readers might also resonate strongly with a specific character because of their particular arc in terms of growth and healing.
How challenging was it writing a book with time travel as a core theme? Personally I’m really picky when it comes to time travel as I feel like sometimes it raises more questions than it answers. I might be wrong but I imagine you had to be more of a ‘plotter’ than a ‘pantser’ to make it work so well?
I’ve been a time travel fan for a very long time – I’d say time travel is right down in the bones of my love for speculative fiction, because it’s how I came to the genre. (I have an ancient blog post about that here! https://www.renhutchings.com/post/from-the-archive-its-about-time) There’s almost always a dash of some kind of “time weirdness” in everything I write, so that part came naturally.
I am actually mostly a chaotic pantser. I write my first drafts completely out of order, and figure out how to slot everything together later. But with non-linear narratives, there’s often a lot of shuffling things around anyway. It helps to stay fluid about what goes where in terms of scene order, deciding where to place reveals, and things like that – I tackle that part in revisions. My biggest focus is always on making sure there’s an emotional through-line that carries the story smoothly from start to finish, even when you’re jumping back and forth between different characters and timelines.
As a writer, or indeed as a reader or viewer, what do you enjoy about the sub-genre of space opera?
I think what I love most in space opera is when there’s that beautiful overlay of the small story and the big story. I enjoy intriguing, close-up character dramas set against the backdrop of a huge, sweeping galactic stage, so you get the sense that the universe they live in spans beyond what you see on the page. I love the juxtaposition of immense, galaxy-altering stakes with relatively small but deeply personal stakes for the main characters. Plus, I love stories that are set in space in general! Space is cool and weird, and the possibilities it contains are literally endless.
Do you have any favourite space operas?
The works of Alastair Reynolds were a huge influence for me, and introduced me to what I would call ‘modern-classic’ space opera – especially the Revelation Space series. Those will always have a special place in my heart. More recently I’ve loved the universes created by Alex White, Aliette de Bodard, Becky Chambers… there’s so much fantastic space opera coming out as we speak.
Last year had some great space opera debuts, including Bluebird by Ciel Pierlot and The Circus Infinite by Khan Wong. I hope we’ll see many more books from them. And coming up later this year, you should keep an eye out for These Burning Stars by Bethany Jacobs! It’s the first of a new trilogy and it is mindblowing – I’ve been fortunate enough to read it already and you need to get it on your TBR!
What was the last thing you read that you loved?
I read and loved an ARC of The Death I Gave Him by Em X. Liu – it’s a queer Hamlet reimagining, told as a near-future sci-fi locked room thriller. It’s so gorgeously written, full of creeping dread and masterfully executed tension. (Sorry, this also isn’t out yet – but it’s coming in September, which is sooner than it seems!)
Is there anything on the horizon for you as a writer?
I must answer this one with a row of eye emojis for now… and a very softly whispered ‘yes.’ I can’t wait to say more. Watch this space. (That was a pun. A space pun.)
In the meantime, if you’ve been waiting for a paperback copy of Under Fortunate Stars, it’s out in softcover now – so you can get your time travelling, history-making space nerds in a smaller, more compact format!
Thanks for joining me, Ren. It was a pleasure to read your work and I hope readers will consider picking it up to see for themselves!
And thanks for all the fantastic questions 🙂
About Ren
Ren is an SFF writer and writing mentor. She has spent most of the past few years working in game dev while plotting twisty space books. Ren’s debut novel, UNDER FORTUNATE STARS, was published by Solaris in May 2022.
Ren previously worked as a creative producer and managed communications for a non-profit arts council. She graduated with a BA in History before completing a year of grad school in archaeology, indulging her lifelong passion for nerding out about the past just as much as the future.
You can find Ren on Twitter and Instagram as @voidcricket.
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