The lovely Polenth Blake was kind enough to join me during this Week of Joy to briefly talk about her writing and her collection, Rainbow Lights.
Synopsis:
A deep-sea robot tells stories in every colour, but no shade can describe meeting a giant squid.
Rainbow Lights is the first collection by science fiction and fantasy author Polenth Blake. Alien scorpions, vampire ice cream sellers and clockwork flies, try to find their place in worlds where being human is optional. These thirty-five stories and poems are a mixture of new pieces and work published in venues like Nature, Strange Horizons and ChiZine.
What first inspired you to write genre fiction? And why do you think genre fiction is such a potent form for storytelling?
I grew up in a family of geeks, so science fiction and fantasy were my bedtime stories. Reality is
subjective, but realistic fiction often doesn’t acknowledge that. It’s written as though what’s real and what isn’t is a concrete division. Speculative fiction has room for playing for those perceptions.
Who are some of your biggest literary influences?
Anne McCaffrey and Isaac Asimov were among the first authors I read. The stories that particularly stood out to me were McCaffrey’s brain ship series and Asimov’s robot stories. I recognise the problems with the
stories now that I’m older, but the general themes still interest me.
The whimsy of E. Nesbit and Lewis Carroll’s work always appealed to me. Whimsical stories are often dismissed as not being serious enough, as though everything in the world is completely serious all the time. In my world, sometimes life is whimsical, and my stories reflect that too.
More recent influences are Nnedi Okorafor and Shweta Narayan. Their stories have a lot of layers, which is something I hope to improve on in my own work.
What is the weirdest story in your collection? How did you come up with the idea behind it?
It’s always hard to judge what’s weird to other people, but even my family thought “Incident in Aisle Five” was odd. It’s set in a giant supermarket, which the people inside think is the whole world. Their culture revolves around the different departments and the division between shoppers and shelfstackers.
My family doesn’t have a car, so I spend a lot of time in the local supermarket. It isn’t my whole world, but sometimes it seems like everything revolves around when I have to go shopping next.
I noticed on your website that the title for your book appears to originate from a Word Cloud. Can you talk about how you structured your collection along color lines and how you decided the name?
The word cloud came after the book, but I had noticed a lot of my stories mentioned colour. I’m sensitive to colours, and often differentiate between colours others see as the same shade, so colour is important to me. It meant splitting the stories into colours was remarkably easy, as the divisions were there waiting to be found.
Rainbow Lights comes from the first story in the collection, as the robot has a fascination with the colour of her own lights. As well as tying the colour theme together, rainbows have other symbolism, such as representing diversity. I write about the people around me, and there are all sorts of people around me.
If there is one thing about writing that you wish you’d known when you first started taking it seriously, what would it be?
I did quite a bit of research before I started, so I generally had a good feel for things. What delayed me from starting in the first place was the idea that writers start out with natural talent. I’d always struggled with writing and I’m dyslexic, so I wasn’t winning writing contests as a child. I didn’t think it’d ever be a career option. So I wish I’d known that being a child prodigy wasn’t required.
And lastly, a silly question: Do you really own pet cockroaches? If so, why?
After the family cat died, I missed having a pet. I’ve always loved invertebrates, and when I saw hissing cockroaches, I was taken with them. Hissers are clean, easy to look after, don’t bite and don’t mind the fact my room is in perpetual darkness.
My current cockroach is Gem, though I plan on getting a few more soon (they’re relatively short-lived, so I’ve taken to keeping my bio in the plural, as numbers change faster than the stories come out). Gem is adventurous and is the only cockroach I’ve had escape. She travelled across my room, climbed the curtain, and fell off (falling a few meters). She survived all this with only slight damage to one antenna.
Cockroaches are fun.
———————————————————
To learn about Polenth Blake and her fiction, head on over to her website!
Like this:
Like Loading...
Related
Week of Joy (Day Two): Rainbow Lights by Polenth Blake (A Mini Interview)
Reading Time
The lovely Polenth Blake was kind enough to join me during this Week of Joy to briefly talk about her writing and her collection, Rainbow Lights.
Synopsis:
What first inspired you to write genre fiction? And why do you think genre fiction is such a potent form for storytelling?
I grew up in a family of geeks, so science fiction and fantasy were my bedtime stories. Reality is
subjective, but realistic fiction often doesn’t acknowledge that. It’s written as though what’s real and what isn’t is a concrete division. Speculative fiction has room for playing for those perceptions.
Who are some of your biggest literary influences?
Anne McCaffrey and Isaac Asimov were among the first authors I read. The stories that particularly stood out to me were McCaffrey’s brain ship series and Asimov’s robot stories. I recognise the problems with the
stories now that I’m older, but the general themes still interest me.
The whimsy of E. Nesbit and Lewis Carroll’s work always appealed to me. Whimsical stories are often dismissed as not being serious enough, as though everything in the world is completely serious all the time. In my world, sometimes life is whimsical, and my stories reflect that too.
More recent influences are Nnedi Okorafor and Shweta Narayan. Their stories have a lot of layers, which is something I hope to improve on in my own work.
What is the weirdest story in your collection? How did you come up with the idea behind it?
It’s always hard to judge what’s weird to other people, but even my family thought “Incident in Aisle Five” was odd. It’s set in a giant supermarket, which the people inside think is the whole world. Their culture revolves around the different departments and the division between shoppers and shelfstackers.
My family doesn’t have a car, so I spend a lot of time in the local supermarket. It isn’t my whole world, but sometimes it seems like everything revolves around when I have to go shopping next.
I noticed on your website that the title for your book appears to originate from a Word Cloud. Can you talk about how you structured your collection along color lines and how you decided the name?
The word cloud came after the book, but I had noticed a lot of my stories mentioned colour. I’m sensitive to colours, and often differentiate between colours others see as the same shade, so colour is important to me. It meant splitting the stories into colours was remarkably easy, as the divisions were there waiting to be found.
Rainbow Lights comes from the first story in the collection, as the robot has a fascination with the colour of her own lights. As well as tying the colour theme together, rainbows have other symbolism, such as representing diversity. I write about the people around me, and there are all sorts of people around me.
If there is one thing about writing that you wish you’d known when you first started taking it seriously, what would it be?
I did quite a bit of research before I started, so I generally had a good feel for things. What delayed me from starting in the first place was the idea that writers start out with natural talent. I’d always struggled with writing and I’m dyslexic, so I wasn’t winning writing contests as a child. I didn’t think it’d ever be a career option. So I wish I’d known that being a child prodigy wasn’t required.
And lastly, a silly question: Do you really own pet cockroaches? If so, why?
After the family cat died, I missed having a pet. I’ve always loved invertebrates, and when I saw hissing cockroaches, I was taken with them. Hissers are clean, easy to look after, don’t bite and don’t mind the fact my room is in perpetual darkness.
My current cockroach is Gem, though I plan on getting a few more soon (they’re relatively short-lived, so I’ve taken to keeping my bio in the plural, as numbers change faster than the stories come out). Gem is adventurous and is the only cockroach I’ve had escape. She travelled across my room, climbed the curtain, and fell off (falling a few meters). She survived all this with only slight damage to one antenna.
Cockroaches are fun.
To learn about Polenth Blake and her fiction, head on over to her website!
Share this:
Like this:
Related
Shaun Duke
Follow Me
Newsletter
Support Me
Recent Posts
A Reading List of Dystopian Fiction and Relevant Texts (Apropos of Nothing in Particular)
Why would someone make a list of important and interesting works of dystopian fiction? Or a suggested reading list of works that are relevant to those dystopian works? There is absolutely no reason other than raw interest. There’s nothing going on to compel this. There is nothing in particular one making such a list would hope you’d learn. The lists below are not an exhaustive list. There are bound to be texts I have forgotten or texts you think folks should read that are not listed. Feel free to make your own list and tell me about it OR leave a comment. I’ll add things I’ve missed! Anywhoodles. Here goes:
Share this:
Like this:
Duke’s Best EDM Tracks of 2024
And so it came to pass that I finished up my annual Best of EDM [Insert Year Here] lists. I used to do these on Spotify before switching to Tidal, and I continued doing them on Tidal because I listen to an absurd amount of EDM and like keeping track of the tunes I love the most. Below, you will find a Tidal playlist that should be public. You can listen to the first 50 tracks right here, but the full playlist is available on Tidal proper (which has a free version just like Spotify does). For whatever reason, the embedded playlist breaks the page, and so I’ve opted to link to it here and at the bottom of this post. Embeds are weird. Or you can pull songs into your preferred listening app. It’s up to you. Some caveats before we begin:
Share this:
Like this:
2025: The Year of Something
We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩
Share this:
Like this:
Categories