Scott Alexander Howard Interview, plus links to author biography, book summaries, excerpts and reviews

An interview with Scott Alexander Howard

A Q&A with the author about his book, The Other Valley, for the Victoria Festival of Authors , with Isabel Jones, Vice President of VFA.

Isabel Jones (IJ): The Other Valley is a wonderful read. The imagined world uses physical geography as a means of time travel which is a new and fascinating concept, the characters are engaging, and the language is lyrical. However, the twists and spirals my brain attempted as I tried to align the implications of visiting the past or future are what made it so memorable for me. I have many wonderings about the logic of visiting The Other Valleys and the effects of each action on the inhabitants of the future valleys. I'll limit my question, though, to your process in structuring the integrity of the novel's world. Did you map out the logic of your world and the effects of alterations in each layer? Is everyone's memory instantly adjusted to any changed reality? Is reality in your world being recreated in every moment, a shifting structure affected by every action? Are you clear on the impact that Odile's actions in the past valley have on her adult world or does it rest in an open-ended speculative zone?

(SAH) Thank you, Isabel! When things go smoothly in the valleys, life there isn't so different from our world. All of our own future paths are causally set in motion by our past and present. The difference is that Odile lives in a place where, in principle, she could learn more about her future than we're able to, and she could also alter her past. The Conseil tries to prevent those things, both politically and physically.

When the Conseil fails and somebody interferes in the past, everyone's entire identity changes. You're not just the same person with altered memories: you're a new person, one who grew up in a new version of the town, and you might differ tremendously from your previous incarnation. Odile has a playful argument about this when Alain is being cheeky about interference. She challenges him to think about how his personality would've been different if he'd grown up in a different neighborhood with different friends, and so on. That's why interference is so dangerous––one minor change replaces everyone.

About the writing process: I do have a chart that tracks the ramifications of what Odile does in the novel, which covers way more time than the events of the book. That being said, my main aim was for The Other Valley to read simply and straightforwardly on an emotional level. I wanted to keep the time travel perplexities mostly under the hood.

(IJ): Readers may make connections between your story and dystopian works like The Giver by Lois Lowry or to multi-verse works like Dark Matter by Blake Crouch, Midnight Library by Matt Haig, The Magician's Nephew by C.S. Lewis, or The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges. Can you tell us about how your reading of dystopian and speculative fiction by other authors has influenced or inspired your work?

(SAH) When I was young I loved C.S. Lewis, and as an adult I've learned a great deal from writers like Borges, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ted Chiang, Yōko Ogawa, and China Miéville. I'll confess that I read more realist than speculative fiction; one of the biggest influences on The Other Valley was Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels. I was keen to fuse an impossible premise with a realist tone. I wanted it to feel like an uncanny but lifelike dream.

The Other Valley certainly has some overlap with dystopian fiction, but I don't personally consider it a capital-D Dystopia. The way I see it, Odile's world has some seriously negative features, but so do most fictional worlds, dystopian or otherwise. What makes a fictional world a dystopia isn't so much that it exceeds a certain amount of grimness, but that it's intended to function as real-world criticism. Think of a dystopian classic like The Handmaid's Tale: it's a fictional world that exists to advance a thesis about gender oppression. Whereas the grimmer aspects of Odile's world, such as the Conseil's authoritarian tendencies, came about largely as practical consequences of my premise … the darker aspects aren't the novel's point, if that distinction makes sense. (Maybe I'm splitting hairs!)

(IJ): Grief plays a major role in how the Conseil manages visits across the valleys. In special cases, visitors may observe younger versions of their lost relatives or friends to help assuage emotions. Many of us would love the opportunity to see lost loved ones or hear their voices again even if just for a moment. Sending visitors twenty years into the past though, risks alterations being made to all the future time valleys. It's interesting that in a generally cold and rigidly organized society that that human need is honored. How did that element evolve for you?

(SAH): I had the idea for the book during a period when I lost some friends, so grief was naturally going to play a role. The notion of the mourning tours was one of the few aspects of the story that never evolved––it was part of the premise from the start. As I developed the world and the security state of the Conseil and gendarmerie, the existence of those visits was non-negotiable, a kind of bedrock for the book. The contrast you mention between rigidity and compassion is interesting to me. Life contains harshness and tenderness, sometimes in extreme degrees, so having them coexist in this society struck me as truthful.

(IJ): Odile's life hasn't been particularly happy to the point when we meet her as a teenager. She is lonely and isolated from her peers. The most positive thing she has to look forward to is a comfortable life if she is accepted into a career with the Conseil. She was just starting to get to know Edme, but after the tragedy of his accident, her life follows a pretty grim arc. Her decision in an emotional moment to skip her Conseil classes sends her in the direction of becoming hard and resigned to the unpleasant nature of her life. I was starting to lose hope that she would find a way out of her downward spiral which made the last pages of the novel a bit of a breathless speed read. Did you give her such a grey, miserable adult life to create tension and to drive the reader's hope, to enhance the sense of relief we feel by the end?

(SAH) I'm happy that the final act was a breathless speed-read! That's one of my favourite things to hear. As the end draws near, I'm playing a game of chicken with the reader: you wonder, are there enough pages left in this book for her to turn things around? The state of her life in Part II serves to ratchet up the tension as it builds toward that climax.

Stepping back from the novel, I can also trace Odile's adult trials to my own emotions while I was writing the book. Odile feels that she's fallen by the wayside of her life, and in that feeling, I can see myself grappling with the experience of leaving academia without a safety net. I had a low-paying job with no prospects for advancement, operating with a constant low-grade panic about the future. Some of that anxiety bled into Odile's life. Her life is obviously harder than a starving artist's, but if anything, she is more content with her lot than I was.

(IJ): Your academic area of study has been around the intriguing relationship of memory, emotion, and literature. The first thing that comes to mind is Proust and his involuntary memory provoked by eating a madeleine. His memory of that moment has a poignancy in recollection that comes through the lens of nostalgic reminiscence. In your valley the visits to the past aren't necessarily satisfying for the visitors, sometimes they barely glimpse their loved one and the process doesn't feel particularly compassionate. What are your thoughts about revisiting the past in our world- seeing childhood homes, connecting with friends from youth and such? Are sweet memories best left alone?

(SAH): I might defer to an expert on this one. In her book The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym distinguished between two forms of nostalgia. One form, "restorative" nostalgia, insists that the past can be reconstructed in the present––restored back to life. (Maybe the clearest example of this is found in reactionary dogmas like "Make America Great Again.") The other form, "reflective" nostalgia, is more self-aware about the lostness of lost time: it dwells on the gap between the past and the present, and it longs for something it knows can't be recaptured, and which may never really have existed in that form at all. This is the kind of nostalgia I associate with Proust and Walter Benjamin and, in places, Virginia Woolf.

I knew Boym before she passed away––she participated in a symposium on my dissertation at Harvard, which was intimidating and wonderful––and I find her disambiguation of the concept helpful for explaining why something called "nostalgia" is both so castigated and so cherished. So, although it's hard to generalize, I'd answer that sweet memories are fair game for reflective nostalgia, and better left alone by restorative nostalgia. In principle there's nothing wrong with longing for the past, if that desire isn't being weaponized against the present.

(IJ): It's easy to see why your book has been optioned for TV. It will make a great show! I'm sure it will be amazing to see your characters walking in the world you created. Will you have input into bringing your world to life, to how it looks and feels?

(SAH) Thanks! I've already had creative input at a foundational level in terms of choosing which producers to go with, and then helping them find the right director-showrunner-screenwriter team to develop it. (I've read a lot of writing samples and watched a lot of shows, which is a fun thing to call work.) As an executive producer on the series, I'll continue to be in conversation with them about the look and feel of the world, the storylines and character dynamics, time-travel nitty-gritty, and so on. But I'm also just one voice in the room, and that's how I wanted it. Novel-writing is very solitary, so it's refreshing to get to take part in a more collaborative medium.

Unless otherwise stated, this interview was conducted at the time the book was first published, and is reproduced with permission of the publisher. This interview may not be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the copyright holder.