Gideon the Ninth
Gideon the Ninth
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Tamsyn Muir on Gideon the Ninth
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A coffin in the sky over LondonThe book has a specific origin point, and it is almost comically unglamorous. Muir was not at a desk, not in a writing retreat. She was exhausted and irritable on a flight from Auckland to Heathrow, and something about the sealed, lightless cabin cracked the story open.
I was on a very long flight from Auckland to Heathrow and I’d been trapped in a plane for over a day, and it was airless and dark and I was cross. I guess it was analogous to being in a coffin.
She went home, wrote Act One, and returned to teaching that September. The one page of notes she’d jotted down contained, among other things, the line ‘Gideon is a fireman or a policeman.’
The plot came first, but the emotional reason to finish the book was something older. Muir had come out at school in New Zealand and found the experience, by her own account, terrible. For years she wrote lesbian stories in locked LiveJournal spaces and did not submit one for professional publication until 2015. When she finally wrote Gideon without filtering herself, she was not building a character so much as recovering one.
Gideon as a book itself is the butch lesbian aesthetic that I’ve always wanted to write; that is my teenage self. You’re just lucky that Gideon isn’t walking around with the really ugly, patterned, button-up men’s shirts that we were all wearing in 2006.
The decision to stop filtering had no calculated strategy behind it. Muir had spent years writing genre fiction in what she considered the expected default American voice, trimming away the parts of herself that felt too local, too specific, too queer. With Gideon, she stopped.
I wish I could say that I had set out to do something very specifically, breaking the paradigm and queering the medium, but I was sick and tired. I didn’t want to think about writing it for an audience. So I sat down, I wrote myself, and I took out the most egregious bits... But it came out gay because I was writing me.
How she wrote it
Telekinesis with meat, built scene by sceneReaders who assume the series mythology was mapped in advance will find the actual planning document deflating. Almost nothing about the Lyctors, the Resurrection Beasts, or the necromantic magic system was pre-designed. Muir has been asked about her process often enough that she now leads with an apology for how underprepared the answer sounds.
I always feel really embarrassed when I get asked this question because I wish I had a more intelligent answer. But I’ve got one single page of notes in the back of an old school book where I’d written down the idea of it about three weeks before I started writing. It’s just a page. It’s large writing. It doesn’t have anything in it of the mythology... It’s like, ‘Gideon’s a fireman!’
The necromantic magic system, in which practitioners command bone and flesh through rigorous scholarship rather than innate gift, was not designed as a world-building feature. It emerged from who Harrow, Gideon’s necromancer and antagonist-turned-partner, needed to be as a person.
Hell, to be honest, necromancy comes about because of the type of person Harrow needed to be... She needed to be somebody who really had to work for it. You get a lot of magic systems that are more intuitive and less about scholarship. But I really wanted a magic system that was scholarship-based, that was something that you had to earn.
When it came time to pitch the book, Muir needed a frame that publishers could hold. The necromancy, the space-gothic setting, the swordfighting cavaliers: none of it had a obvious commercial shelf. The murder mystery did, and more importantly, Muir believed it was accurate.
I never really pitched the trilogy as a trilogy. I pitched Gideon as more or less a murder mystery, because to me that’s still its most fundamental DNA: it’s the classic And Then There Were None set-up, a group of people in an isolated location start getting killed off one by one.
Gideon’s voice, with its anachronistic slang and irreverent rhythm, sounds like no one else in the genre partly because Muir spent years actively suppressing the cadence that comes naturally to her. Early genre manuscripts had prompted readers to ask whether the story was set in New Zealand, which she’d taken as a problem to fix. By the time she started writing Gideon, she had stopped fixing it.
My favorite kind of horror is the slow reveal. Horror’s horror if it scares you either way — much like erotica, it is looking for the physical response — but I think the defining characteristic of my favorite type of horror is a realization of the uncanny: the slow lifting of a mirror up to your face so you can see the crack. I love it when horror stains backward through an entire text.
That backward stain is by design. The horror in Gideon is calibrated to pay off on rereads, to sit quietly in scenes you’ve already passed before you understand what you were reading.
The personal thread
Going back for the seventeen-year-old left behindMuir has spoken in multiple contexts about the years she spent writing queer stories in spaces where no one outside a small community would see them. The response to Gideon from queer readers collapsed that distance. Speaking about the character in a video interview, she described the gap between writing Gideon in private and watching readers find her.
I just wanted to put someone in for my 17-year-old self. And the way that people responded to her is like getting to go back in time and telling my younger self, ‘It’s okay.’ [paraphrased from audio]
Part of what Muir was building against was a pattern she’d grown up frustrated by: female protagonists whose arc bends, whatever else happens, toward healing and comfort rather than toward violence rewarded as violence. Gideon carries a two-handed sword and the book does not apologize for that. This was a structural choice as much as a character one.
In Gideon, the lesbian goggles are fused to your face. It’s impossible to escape. Even the plot relies on women having had terrible affairs with each other. I wanted it to reflect the world as I lived in it, where everybody’s three degrees removed from everybody else, everybody’s ex-girlfriend is another person’s ex-girlfriend, or current girlfriend, or future girlfriend.
What she wants us to sit with
Can you love without takingMuir has described the necromancer-cavalier bond at the center of Gideon, in which a necromancer and their sworn sword-bearer form a pair that is legally and spiritually fused, as a vehicle for a question she returns to across the whole series. Each pairing at Canaan House is a different answer to whether deep attachment is compatible with leaving the other person whole.
I have always been fascinated by enmeshed relationships. I love seeing pairs of people in a not necessarily romantic way. And in fact, in the mythology, it’s not meant to be romantic at all, but it inevitably has that shaded into it.
The world of the Locked Tomb is structured so that queerness requires no narrative justification: the word ‘lesbian’ does not appear in the novel, and the political struggles readers might expect to accompany queer identity are absent. That absence is the point. Muir built a world that reflects how she actually lived, not a world where she had to argue for the right to exist in it.
In Gideon, the lesbian goggles are fused to your face. It’s impossible to escape. Even the plot relies on women having had terrible affairs with each other.
Muir’s most direct statement of what she hoped readers would carry away from Gideon comes from one of her earliest interviews, before the book had even found its audience. It is less about this novel specifically and more about what she wanted the novel to license: the idea that genre fiction could hold everything a writer actually is.
I want people to realise there are no boundaries. I wrote a murder mystery science-fantasy set in the middle of a will-they won’t-they rapprochement between two human beings who have been terribly hurt by the world... What I want them to say is — ‘Wait, you can do that in science fiction and fantasy?? Can I do that? I thought I wouldn’t be taken seriously.’ Reflect everything you are in your work, not just the things you think are fit for public consumption.