Adding a Bit of Magic: Zen Cho Discusses Her Debut Sorcerer to the Crown

Do you remember the first story that you ever wrote?
I don’t remember it myself, but it’s the kind of thing where you’ve been told about it so much it’s almost like you remember it. My mom [talks about] a story I wrote when I was about 6 years old that was basically a ripoff of 101 Dalmatians, but it’s a bunny.
So there’s this little girl and her bunny got stolen, and she tracked it down. And these bad guys have stolen the bunny and they’re going to make coats out of the bunnies. [The girl] comes on one bad guy talking to the other bad guy on the phone, like, “Yes, we’ve got all the rabbits now, it’s amazing. We’re going to make coats and they’ll all die!”
But what he starts doing is laughing maniacally, as you do as a villain. And he laughs and laughs and laughs so much that he dies, basically, and then she goes around and lets all the bunnies out of their cages. That was my first story. My mom finds it hilarious. She thinks it’s because I couldn’t figure out an ending.
That’s a good ending! Were you always a reader of fantasy and genre books or did you come to that later?
I came to that a little later. I read a lot British authors growing up, and especially a lot of period fiction. Penguin Popular Classics—they were 2P, quite cheap. I used to buy one each week.
Where were you living?
In Malaysia—I grew up in Malaysia. So I just read voraciously all these Victorian writers. I think that’s what led me into genre. I read the usual genre stuff—Narnia, that sort of thing; Lord of the Rings I read when I was twelve—but I was reading Austen before then, and I think that leads quite naturally. Because when I was reading Dickens or Austen, they were quite like fantasy.
The world building is kind of the same.
It was a completely different world from the one I lived in, so it felt very natural. So I think it’s very natural that I’m writing historical fantasy.

A lot of your short fiction is contemporary. What made you decide that you wanted to tackle historical fantasy for your first novel?
I think of myself as writing these two modes. One is Malaysian fantasy, which is Spirits Abroad, and I think that is really easy to do because I don’t have to do any research. I basically pick something that happened in my life, add a bit of magic, and then it becomes a story. Then the second one is my fluff for post-Colonial book nerds, which I just made up, where I draw on the things that I read growing up and still enjoy, add a bit of magic, and try to critique some of the things that I didn’t really notice as a kid.
The period setting in Sorcerer to the Crown is kind of romanticized in some ways, but then you have the black magician as the leader of the country, there’s a lot of tension due to his former status as a slave child, and the female lead is in a similar situation. They’re kind of battling against society as well as the magic and fairies and other stuff you throw at them. What inspired that?
It was my way into that world. When I was reading period fiction growing up, I could tell there was a gap, something that wasn’t being said, or quite a lot not being said. As I got older I started reading the history around it. Jane Austen’s England is an England profiting off of slavery. Thomas Bertram in Mansfield Park, his wealth is from plantations in Antigua. It’s stated, but it’s not really central.
The kind of hubristic thing I say about this is, I really wanted to talk about the centrality of the colonial territories to the Empire. People think of Regency England as this little bubble, which has been created by Georgette Heyer and authors like that. I wanted to claim that bubble. It is romanticized, it is an illusion—this world never existed. But I wanted to imagine people like me and people like Zacharias and Prunella could exist in that bubble—because they did exist.
How did you decide this story was going to be your first novel? The worlds in your short stories are complex enough that it feels like many of them could support novels.
It’s cool that you say that, because I couldn’t figure out how to write a novel. So what happened was, I wrote two others before I wrote this one. They weren’t very good. One of them was set in contemporary Malaysia and wasn’t speculative at all, and I don’t know why I did that because the whole time I was like, “Where are the dragons?” The second was [also] contemporary Malaysian, but YA fantasy. Neither of them really worked, and I think the reason [Sorcerer] is the one that eventually sold was that I could borrow the structure of a Regency novel. I couldn’t quite work out how to make a novel work at that length and keep the story going, and having Regency romances to draw on helped. It has a period structure.
If you had a dull moment, just have them go to a ball.
Yeah, exactly. Have them be held up by highwaymen. That doesn’t happen, but you could do it.
I liked hearing about all the gowns and the fancy clothes. What has it been like watching critics and early readers respond to the book? It’s definitely one those buzz titles I heard a lot about quite early on. Big names were actually calling the publisher and saying, “I want to blurb this book because I’ve heard so much about it.” What’s that like for you as a debut novelist?
I feel very fortunate. I think, to a certain extent, I worry, “Well, it could just be a book that only writers like.” It’s great, and I really hope it helps the book’s reception in the wider world, but ultimately I’m trying to really focus on the next book. That’s what’s important.
Is the next one a direct sequel or are you playing around in the world more?Kind of both. Prunella and Zacharias will appear again. But it’s going to also have two new sets of characters who are set apart, which will hopefully intertwine.
Did you intentionally want to make it separate, so you’re not locking readers into feeling like they have to follow a series?
Not really. I think, having lived with Prunella and Zacharias for two years, I was just like, “You guys are boring now.”And maybe I’m too fond of them. I don’t really want to put them through the ringer any more. A couple of bad things will happen to them, but not too bad. Maybe by the third book, I will have lost all my affection and will be able to really torture them.
How has going through the editorial process on this book changed the way you work?
I’ve never been through such a thorough editorial process, which I think is really good. It really, hopefully, taught me some things about how novels work. I sort of just started writing. Some people read all these books about story beats and all that and they know [how to structure a book], but I didn’t. I didn’t consciously think about the classic rising action and that kind of thing.
Are you still writing short stories in between?
I haven’t written a short story in a while. I always knew I wanted to do something of longer length, because I enjoy that character stuff that you don’t really get to enjoy in a short story. I’d quite like to do a couple of novellas, and I keep getting started on them, but then I get distracted because the proofs come in or my editorial notes come in.
You talked about putting characters into the cultural time when they didn’t appear in the literature of era, but you also do that a lot with your contemporary fantasy. Your characters are tend to be ex-pats, living somewhere new and struggling with the day-to-day of not having found their place. Why is that a theme that you come to again and again?
It’s funny when you point it out, because when you’re writing you don’t think about it. I grew up in Malaysia, but we left and moved to the U.S. for a couple of years when I was six or seven. Then we went back to Malaysia, and that was quite a lot of culture shock.. You change quite a lot in a short period of time when you’re a kid, so I went back with this complete American accent. I went straight to Chinese school as well and didn’t really speak Chinese at the time, so that was quite traumatic.
We lived in Malaysia but we moved around a lot, so I was always changing schools. I think I went to five different schools between seven and 18. And then I went to England when I was 17. Because I’m one of those people who’ve been in a lot of places, I feel very rooted in my cultural identity, but it is a cultural identity that is a mix of things, which not everyone will recognize as legitimate. I think I kind of found my place, but I’m always very conscious that it is a delicate balance to strike. That’s why I’m quite interested in characters who are a little bit lost, trying to negotiate different cultures and being in between different cultures.
Your book is a historical fantasy, but the themes tie into conversations that are going on in genre right now—gender and race and cultural appropriation. Were you aware of those issues when you were writing the story and attempting to contribute to those conversations?
I was definitely aware. I didn’t deliberately write it to contribute to the conversation—actually, the conversation enabled me to write it. What’s quite common for Anglophone Malaysians, because we all grow up reading British and North American books, because the distribution is much better, what happens is that people produce things that are very similar to the things that they read. So you read a lot about blue-eyed farm boys becoming kings or whatever. People have to grope their way back to the voice that’s connected to their actual lives and the people they know. I definitely went through a period where I was like, “I need to stop writing about Westerners.” I wrote a lot of fanfic as well.

What properties did you like to write about?
All these British authors—Discworld. Good Omens was a big fandom for me. I often did Regency alternate universes as well, like, “Oh. I’ll write about Smallville, but I’ll set it in Regency England.”
I would read that.
It was fun, but I got to the point where I was like, “I have to write something that’s true to me.” And that was actually around the time of 2009, when really the [conversations about race] started getting more obvious. Because they had been going on, but were harder to access without the internet.
Even before Twitter became really big, blogs were talking about these issues. Those conversations helped me formulate what the problem was, and once I recognized that, I could figure out a way to deal with [it]. And Sorcerer is one of the things that I’ve written to try and address that issue.
Sorcerer to the Crown is available September 1.