Interview with Evette Davis, author of The Others (The Council Trilogy, Book 1)

Today it gives the Speculative Fiction Showcase great pleasure to interview Evette Davis, whose debut novel The Others (The Council Trilogy, Book 1) was published on 17th September 2024.

The protagonist, Olivia Shepherd, is a political consultant, and so are you. How much is Olivia based on yourself?  

All her bad habits are mine. I’m only half joking…she’s a mix of dozens of consultants I’ve known throughout my career. She’s also an amalgamation of lots of women I’ve known over the years who have struggled with how to find their voice as they move through the world. 

The Others is set in contemporary San Francisco, where you live now. How far is the city itself a character or theme in the novel?

San Francisco plays a significant role in the story because the City is full of supernatural beings, sometimes obscured by our world-famous fog. Major landmarks are featured. For example, the DeYoung Museum is the headquarters of a secret society Olivia is asked to join. I love San Francisco and the Bay Area, and it was a pleasure weaving familiar places into the story. Hopefully, readers will get a kick out of seeing familiar landmarks in a new light.  

Olivia discovers that she is an empath and is drawn into a magical underside to San Francisco, the realm of “The Others.” What can you tell us about the Others and the world they inhabit? 

The Council is the magical entity we need right now: a secret society of supernatural beings – witches, vampires, shapeshifters, etc. – who intervene in world politics and events to maintain the balance of peace. Their members are, in some cases, hundreds of years old and have experienced many wars and events and try to avoid similar things from happening in the future. They are headquartered in San Francisco but have offices and members worldwide. As far as San Francisco goes, these supernatural beings are living their lives in parallel to humans, riding the subway and pitching in major league baseball teams just like anyone else. 

You have spoken of your dislike of fascism and xenophobia. How far are these themes woven into the novel? 

They’re woven into the entire trilogy. In The Others, Olivia runs an election for a congressional candidate, and there is an opponent. The political race allows me to explore the fragile nature of our public discourse and the stark choices people must make these days when choosing leaders.  It’s a theme that follows all three books in The Council Trilogy. Think of it as a supernatural West Wing. 

You describe The Others as an urban fantasy. What does that mean to you? 

Fantasy stories set in contemporary, urban settings. As opposed to Middle Earth. 

What characters does Olivia meet on her journey into the world of the Others, and who is William? 

The first person she meets is Elsa, her spirit guide and a time walker sent to look after her. From there, she’s introduced to Gabriel Laurent, the head of the Council and a powerful French witch. Her best friend is Lily. She is a San Francisco librarian and a fairy. William is a 190-year-old vampire. The two meet by chance and are drawn to one another. William becomes her lover, but his secrets threaten to keep them apart.  

How did you research and create the mythology of the story and set it against a contemporary backdrop? 

The backdrop was the easy part. I’ve lived in San Francisco for more than twenty years, so it’s very familiar to me. The mythology took some time as I explored the characters and fleshed them out. When I started writing, I knew I wanted my main characters to be modern versions of witches, vampires, and shapeshifters who hide in plain sight of the people around them. 

Would you call The Others a Romantasy, and how do you feel about writing romantic scenes?

I guess it is!  I like writing romantic/ sexy scenes, especially if my characters have great chemistry, like Olivia and William. 

Why is the theme of female empowerment important to you, and in your writing?

It’s the puzzle I try to solve in my own life as a leader and professional. How do women find their power, their agency? How do they learn to use it constructively? How do we get or stay comfortable with authority, especially in a world where many people dislike strong women? My stories examine those issues, albeit camouflaged by fantasy or dystopian themes. 

How do you balance life as a writer with a demanding day-job?

I’m also married and the mother of a college-age daughter. I guess my answer is that I continue to struggle for balance. Some weeks, I make plenty of time for writing. Other times, it must be postponed. Deadlines help me focus, and I haven’t watched television for many years. I’ve given up kicking back in the evenings after dinner to write. 

The Others is part of a trilogy - how do you see it developing? 

Great question! The second book in the series – The Gift – will be published in March 2025. The third and final book – The Campaign - will be out in the fall of 2025. In book two, Olivia finds herself in Eastern Europe hunting an enemy. Her revenge quest is almost her undoing, and then, in the last book, she battles a familiar foe while trying to elect a woman president. There will be lots of near-death experiences and some romantic twists and turns. 

The novel contrasts the politics of present-day San Francisco with that of the magical realm. How did you compare and contrast those different kinds of intrigue?

For the contemporary characters of The Council, their magic is secondary to the political conditions, and they find themselves reacting as any human might with a few twists. For example, the Nazis in WWII knew vampires were working in the resistance and killed them when captured but used traditional means: i.e., a wooden stake and the removal of their head. But there are specific rules that apply to their world. Witches are forbidden to mate with humans, for example, but here is Olivia, Gabriel’s daughter, through an ill-fated romance. 

What do you like to read, when you have time? 

I read lots of sci-fi, fantasy, and non-fiction. I’m reading The Black Bird Oracle, Book 5 in the All Souls Series by Deborah Harkness. Next up is The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo. I am also a sucker for historical romances. Especially series like The Ravenels by Lisa Kleypas. They all have happy endings and feisty female characters who defy the odds, and they’re so different from what I’m writing that I can laugh and enjoy myself without introducing problems for the characters dancing around in my head. 

Are there any writers whose work you particularly admire?

There are too many to list, but a few that I would mention are Deborah Harkness, Ursula Le Guin, Elizabeth Kostova, Samantha Whisky, Ilona Andrews, and Jesse Mihalik. Lisa Kleypas and Nora Roberts are my heroes. I return again and again to the poetry of T.S. Eliot and E.E. Cummings, and I’ve been known to re-read Macbeth from time to time. 

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About Evette Davis:

Evette Davis is a science-fiction and fantasy writer. She is most recently the author of “48 States,” which Kirkus named one of the Best Indie Books of 2022. The book was also a quarter-finalist for the BookLife Prize 2023 and longlisted in the 2023 Indie Book Awards.  

Davis is also the author of The Others, the first installment of The Council Trilogy, released in September 2024 by Spark Press. 

Davis is a member of the Board of Directors for Litquake, San Francisco’s annual literary festival. In 2023 and 2017, Friends of the San Francisco Public Library honored Davis as a Library Laureate. Her work has also been published in the San Francisco Chronicle.

When she’s not writing novels, Davis advises some of the country’s largest corporations, nonprofits and institutions as a consultant and co-owner of BergDavis Public Affairs, an award-winning San Francisco-based consulting firm. Before establishing her firm, Davis worked in Washington as a press secretary for a member of Congress. She previously was a reporter for daily newspapers in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Davis splits her time between San Francisco and Sun Valley, Idaho.

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The Sum of All Things (City States Cycle, Book 10) by Seb Doubinsky

Release date: November 5, 2024

Subgenre: Dystopian fiction

 

About The Sum of All Things:

 

The highly anticipated final installment in Seb Doubinsky’s City-States Cycle is smart, subtle and unputdownable! 

 

In New Samarqand, trouble is brewing: The king is very ill, nobody knows who will succeed him and terrorist groups are plaguing the city-state. In the eye of the storm, the National Museum is opening a new wing displaying the magnificent tomb of two Amazon sisters, who fell in battle together. Following parallel lines in this ominous labyrinth, Hokki, the new museum director, Ali the police commissioner, Kassandra, the poet, Thomas, the used-books seller and Vita, the secret agent from Planet X try to keep the pieces together and fight against the forces of chaos threatening their very existence.

 

Excerpt: 

 

VITA

The sun cut the bed sheets in two halves, one golden, one light blue. Through the open window, Vita could hear the early morning traffic, shouts, a woman’s laughter, the sound of a radio, the reassuring litany of daily life. For how long? she thought. For how long before all this is corrupted and gone, a washed-out memory, people will think it’s from old films and not from their own lives? Sitting up in the bed, she combed her short hair with her fingers. She had dyed it a boring brown to remain under the radar. Or the radars, plural. She had changed her looks right before arriving here, three weeks ago—an eternity you could say if you looked at her former life; an instant, a mere second if you looked at the bigger, cosmic picture. Time was the essence of her action—a paradox as she had both plenty of and yet not enough.

The sunrays caressed her naked body, feeling the muscles, appreciating the curves. She shook her head vigorously, chasing away the last inky drops of sleep that marred her consciousness. Her hand felt the empty space beside her, then the warmth of her pillow—her own warmth. How long since she had loved? Longer than she had been loved, in any case. Poor Thomas, Terrence, Paul, Vladimir and Hassan. She had loved Thomas. He had been the only one. She had loved him and they had killed him. The other guys, no, they had all survived—maybe because she hadn’t loved them. Love was lethal: it was the essence of death, not of life. The rarest and most dangerous poison. And if, by chance, you survived, you remained crippled forever.

She stood up and got dressed quickly. Jeans, t-shirt, leather jacket. The bare essentials. The hotel room was sparsely furnished, but comfortable—a table, two chairs, a cupboard (painted blue), the bed and nothing else. The smell of beeswax and dust floated around her, prickling her nose. She glanced at the blue sky framed by the window as a painting of impossible beauty and thought about the invisible machine in the sky, the Subliminal Empire’s technological eye, watching this planet while it was slowly destroying it.

 

HOKKI

The plane landed with a screech and a brutal sway, throwing all passengers both forward and sideways. Samarqandi Airlines were famous for their deadly crashes and Hokki muttered a silent prayer to an unknown God, which proved incredibly efficient as they stopped, unharmed, a few seconds later. Nobody clapped though, as they would have in the West. Instead the passengers turned to each other, smiled and shook hands. Hokki did the same with a wrinkled old lady wearing a traditional embroidered blue cotton gown and a flat cloth hat of the same color. She raised her hand above her head, saying something he didn’t understand. He then realized she was gesturing that he was very tall, which was true. He was a big man by Western standards, a giant of legends here. He nodded and they laughed together, the tiny woman hiding her mouth with her hand, he making the “ho-ho-hos” of a giant. Grabbing his bag to get off the plane, he told himself the adventure had just begun and that he had almost been killed from the start.

 

THOMAS

Thomas immediately recognized the short round man who walked into his shop, stumbling over the doormat.

“Commissioner-General Shakr Bassam!” he said from behind his counter, smiling. “Are you coming to my shop to arrest me or to buy a book?”

“Commissioner-General First Class,” the policeman corrected him as he made his way between the colorful shelves. “And don’t you joke about being arrested. It pains me. Can we go talk in your office?”

“Sure,” Thomas said, leading the way between the shelves.

The policeman’s somber look was a strange thing to behold with such a usually jovial man.

They both settled in the worn-out red designer leather armchairs decorating his tiny backroom office. He had bought the pair for a few bills at the flea market. The vendor had assured him they came from the Viborg City embassy when it was shut down during the Southeast Chinese world war—the war in which Thomas had directly participated with his hacker group by bringing down a Western Alliance military satellite, forcing him into exile in this city. He was now a political refugee, protected by New Samarqand through his friend Ali, who was the head cop of the city-state and who had helped him buy this bookstore and set up his new identity. Thomas considered the chairs as indirect spoils of war, enjoying their solid comfort with a zest of satisfying revenge.

“So?” Thomas said as Ali made sure he wasn’t sitting on the tail of his jacket.

“I have sad and worrying news, my friend. The king is very, very ill,” the policeman said, almost whispering.

Thomas nodded, waiting for his friend and protector to continue.

“I am worried about the rumors I am getting. Bad times ahead, I’m afraid.” the policeman added gloomily.

Thomas knew that if Ali Shakr Bassam said he was worried about the situation, then things were indeed really bad, as the policeman was prone to understatements. They both stared pensively at the poster of the goddess Nut decorating the opposing wall. She was the symbol of their secret congregation, the Egregorians, keepers and protectors of culture. Founded in 1934, just after the first Nazi public book-burnings, by a group of Jewish and non-Jewish writers, artists, psychoanalysts, politicians and intellectuals, the Egregorian Society was dedicated to fight intolerance in all its cultural forms. An égrégore was the spiritual and carnal manifestation of the common desire of a community, becoming an extremely powerful negative entity. It was, in short, a political monster. For them, Nazism was an égrégore, announced by the cultural wave of antisemitism that had preceded it. The same was true for Stalinism and any totalitarian movement that suddenly seized power through a revolution, be it political or religious. In their eyes, the only way you could efficiently fight and ultimately destroy such monsters was by using the same weapon against them: to build a cultural positively charged invisible “Golem,” ultimately stronger than the negatively charged spiritual monster.

The Egregorian Society had moved to New Istanbul in 1936, and after the war had one chapter on every continent and main city-states, each with a secret library, containing manuscripts and publications of authors censored in their own countries. Commissioner-General First Class Ali Shakr Bassam was the head of the Egregorian Society Section in New Samarqand and Thomas was its librarian and archivist.

“I can make some tea,” Thomas offered, but Shakr Bassam placed his hand on the young man’s forearm before he could move.

“No time,” he said. “I am only here to tell you of the situation and to organize a meeting as soon as possible. I had a quick talk over the phone with our fellow members. They agree that the times are dire. Something bad is going to happen. I know it. We all know it. Who knows what will happen with the twins when the king is dead? What will they do? Is there going to be a civil war when one of them is chosen to be king or queen?”

The twins were the ailing king Ujal’s children, Princess Farah and Prince Hamad. If New Samarqand was a relatively functioning democracy, with various parties and a rather precarious freedom of speech, it was also a monarchy.

Allied with the Chinese Confederation, it was considered one of the “evil powers” by the Western Alliance, and had therefore suffered many years from a strict economic blockade. The timid political reforms undertaken by king Ujal in the past three years had gradually thawed the city-state’s relations with the Western Alliance, but it was still under hard scrutiny, and the question of who was going to be his successor was considered a crucial test.

“What do you want me to do?” Thomas asked.

“I need you to do some . . . um, research for me. You know, check the usual suspects’ emails and such. And some embassies too.”

Thomas nodded. He was not only the Egregorians’ librarian and archivist, he was also their best hacker.

“Sure,” he said.

The policeman got up and turned around before leaving the small room, like a chubby Inspector Columbo.

“One last thing,” he said. “Before all the rest, check this person out. It might be important.”

He handed Thomas a small piece of paper.

“Hokki Makkonen,” the librarian read out loud. “Who’s that?”

“Exactly what I want to know,” the Commissioner said, before disappearing among the unsorted piles of books.

 

KASSANDRA

Naila walked into the little study and frowned at the gray cloud of smoke surrounding her companion and official employer, the world-famous poet Kassandra Alexopoulos, who was sitting at her desk, typing on her laptop, smoking her pipe, and dressed in her bathrobe.

“Phew!” Naila said. “You could have at least opened the window, Kassie!”

“I am working,” Kassandra quipped.

“You can work, take a pause and smoke in the garden. Here, I brought you a glass of tea. And you should get dressed. We’re going to be late.”

Kassandra sighed and picked up the hot glass from its saucer, holding it by the rim.

“I don’t want to go,” she said.

Naila rolled her eyes. “You’re like an impossible child sometimes,” she scolded her partner. “It’s important. People are counting on you.”

“It’s a just a poetry festival. Nobody cares about poetry anymore.”

“Tsk, tsk, tsk! Don’t be a diva.”

“But I am a diva,” Kassandra smirked.

“So be a diva in front of your audience. It’s much more gratifying.”

Kassandra put down her glass and stretched her arms with a long sigh.

“Yes, you are right.”

She turned off her laptop and got up.

“I will get dressed and sing my poems to the world,” she said dramatically, then burst into a laughter, joined by Naila.

“Who said poetry should be a serious thing, anyway?” she asked no one in particular, and disappeared into her bedroom.

 

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About Seb Doubinsky:

Seb Doubinsky is a bilingual writer born in Paris in 1963. His novels, all set in a dystopian universe revolving around competing cities-states, have been published in the UK and in the USA. He currently lives with his family in Aarhus, Denmark, where he teaches at the university.

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About Meerkat Press: 

 Meerkat Press is an independent publisher committed to finding and publishing exceptional, irresistible, unforgettable fiction. And despite the previous sentence, we frown on overuse of adjectives and adverbs in submissions. *smile*

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