It’s like, “Gideon’s a fireman!” Gideon is not a fireman, that has been tragically excised from the mythology. It doesn’t have anything in it of the mythology, which I hope is baroque, which comes later. But I’ve got one single page of notes in the back of an old school book where I’d written down the idea of it about three weeks before I started writing. I always feel really embarrassed when I get asked this question because I wish I had a more intelligent answer. The truth is, everything developed from the story template. Here’s me developing the entire society and its economics and what coinage it’s using and numismatics. God, what came first? The chicken or the egg? I wish I could say I was one of those authors who for five years before publication had this really thick journal where they were like, here’s exactly what goes on.

So how did you go about developing this really baroque world-building, with the magic system and the nine different Houses and Lyctors and the Resurrection Beasts? And then once you had that in place, how did you think about which little bits the reader would need to know when? There are just these tiny little drips of information that get sent to the reader a little bit at a time.

One of the things that’s really impressive to me is how carefully it’s delivered. I want to start by looking at this incredibly complex mythology you’ve created.

You can check out our full conversation in the video above, or read highlights in the transcript below, lightly edited for length and clarity.Īnd if you’d like to keep the fun going, sign up for the Vox Book Club newsletter and stay tuned for the discussion of our February book, Raven Leilani’s Luster. We asked Muir to explain herself, and she obliged. It’s a rich and vibrant story about love and sin and redemption, laced through with allusions to everything from Peter’s denial of Christ to the none pizza with left beef meme. The Locked Tomb trilogy’s logline is that it is about lesbian necromancers in space, but it’s also so much more than that.

And at the end of January, we met up with Muir on Zoom to talk them through. So the Vox Book Club spent December and January with two of the most fun books I’ve read in a long time: the first two volumes of Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb trilogy, Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth. The Vox Book Club is linking to to support local and independent booksellers.

Ich bin Harrow by Tamsyn Muir