The bestseller sends a graduate student to the underworld to resurrect her adviser in Katabasis.
Why combine academia and hell?
There’s a passage in Katabasis that ponders why so many ancient visions of hell just look like the world that the inhabitants knew before they died. Many hells look like bureaucratic courts, or palaces. I was thinking about possible philosophical underpinnings for this, and one seemed to be that whatever punishment befalls us in hell will only make sense within the scope of the moral universe that we know, the stakes that we’re familiar with. So my version of hell is a shifting and unpredictable topography; it’s constantly reorienting and reconstituting itself, and for these particular characters it chooses to present itself as a campus, because that is the scope of their moral universe.
You’re also explicitly building off of many different earlier mythologies. How did you decide which elements to pull in?
I kind of didn’t decide. That was the fun of working on a novel that is very syncretic, that takes inspiration from a gajillion world mythologies and theologies and religious systems. The characters are constantly sifting through theories from all sorts of ancient literatures, and they’re testing them against their empirical data to figure out, you know, who was right. World civilizations have been trying to solve the problem of what happens after we die for so long, and we all have different versions of it, and they converge in interesting points. A lot of religions converge on this idea of a river as the passage into the underworld, for instance. But yeah, I didn’t pick one, and that was the fun of writing the book: getting to present all of them like a buffet of choices that help or don’t.
Heroine Alice Law is getting her degree in analytical magick, which draws heavily from philosophy and logic. What inspired the magic system?
I’m not a philosopher, but I’m married to a philosopher and we host a lot of department parties. Having just done a magic system that was based on linguistics and history [in 2022’s Babel], which are much closer to my comfort areas, I wanted to do something that I had no expertise in. I had to learn about classical logic. My husband and I actually threw a paradox party where we invited all the logicians in his department and everybody had to present a logic paradox that could feasibly be a magic spell that the characters use. We had a whiteboard in the living room and they would write out their paradox and explain it, and then we would argue over whether it was a paradox or not—so, my ideal kind of party. That’s how I came up with most of the spells.
