Locus a écrit : Tell us about your debut novel She Who Became the Sun — the world where it takes place, and the characters who inhabit that world.
She Who Became the Sun is set in China in the mid-1350s, which was the last gasps of a period of short-lived Mongol rule over China — the Yuan dynasty. The Mongols were steppe warriors from a nomadic culture, and China was a sedentary civilisation with a complex bureaucratic system of government, so it didn’t work out very well. The Yuan’s institutions were fragile, they made a lot of mistakes with things like fiscal policy, and their oppression of ethnic Chinese provoked huge resentments. So when a spate of natural disasters hit, about 80 years into Mongol rule, everything fell apart. Peasants rebelled; warlords grabbed territory; bandits terrorised the countryside. It was chaos. And that’s the kind of situation in which ambitious people can find opportunities to advance further than they ever could have ordinarily.
My main character, Zhu Yuanzhang, is such a person. She’s based on the historical figure of the founding emperor of the Ming dynasty, but she’s not exactly him. As a girl peasant, the world has decreed her to be worthless. Her fate is to die early. But she refuses. She steals another identity and another fate, because she’s determined to survive. And sometimes the best way to survive is to be so great that nobody can touch you.
