Midnight Never Come Is Elizabethan Spy Story

Fantasy author Marie Brennan told SCI FI Wire that her latest novel, Midnight Never Come, commits one of the original sins of fantasy: It's an Elizabethan faerie spy novel based on a role-playing game.

"In 2006 I ran a game I called Memento, after the Guy Pearce movie of the same name, because we went through 650 years of English history backward," Brennan said in an interview. "The Elizabethan segment of the game really stuck with me--the faerie queen I had invented for that period, the backstory driving that particular segment of the plot and so on. So I removed the arc-plot of those 650 years, filed off the few bits that were game-specific and expanded what remained from a skeleton into a fully fleshed-out book that is Midnight Never Come."

The result is what Brennan calls her "Elizabethan faerie spy novel," she said. "Thirty years ago, Princess Elizabeth, imprisoned by her sister, Mary, in the Tower of London, made a pact with the faerie Invidiana," Brennan said. "Now they are both queens, Elizabeth ruling the mortal world from Westminster, Invidiana ruling the fae from a palace hidden beneath London. There's a secret alliance between them still, with each manipulating politics on both sides for their benefit, but they don't exactly get along, and that particular house of cards may be about to fall apart."

Midnight Never Come can be read through several different genre lenses, one of them being urban fantasy. "I love when that subgenre fits the fantastic into the shape of the world we know, adding a layer without disturbing the one already there," Brennan said. "That's why I became obsessive about my research; I wanted the faerie court to influence the mortal world in ways that would feel like a revelation of history instead of a revision."

As for the fae themselves, Brennan decided to preserve regionalism as much as she could. "Which is to say, much faerie fiction is syncretic: It gleefully mixes up Scottish kelpies and Greek centaurs and Japanese kitsune or whatever else suits its purpose," she said. "I enjoy that, but for Midnight Never Come, which is set in the 16th century, it felt more appropriate to differentiate the various cultures."

Brennan is currently working on And Ashes Lie, a standalone sequel, which takes place during the mid-17th century.

-John Joseph Adams