Aliette De Bodard

The French-Vietnamese writer will always have Paris... to destroy.

- Jonathan Wright

Paris isn’t just the city Aliette de Bodard calls home, it’s a city she adores. Although, as she herself concedes, she has a strange way of showing this when it comes to her fiction. “Apparently, my way of writing love letters to cities is to write books where they’re completely nuked and people are fighting to death in the ruins,” she tells SFX.

She’s talking about her Dominion Of The Fallen series, a “Gothic dark fantasy” set in an alternate Paris torn apart by “a great magical war”. As portrayed in new novel The House Of Binding Thorns, a standalone sequel to The House Of Shattered Wings, it’s a place of “magical residue clogging the skies”, where the Seine runs black “with the remnants of spells”, and opposing sides, factions of fallen angels, are still fighting “a cold car of intrigues and political backstabbing in the ruins of the city”.

Somehow, it’s no surprise when de Bodard says she’s “fascinated” by war – but there’s an important caveat. “It’s not really combat that I’m interested in,” she says, “but rather, the effect of the war on civilians and its aftermath – the everyday struggle to survive in a ravaged land, the difficult path to lay old grudges to rest, and the slow and painful process of rebuilding something that can never be what the equal of what existed before – something that is both less and more, and wholly new, and still raw and painful.”

AFTER THE WAR