Impossible Creatures
Impossible Creatures
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Katherine Rundell on Impossible Creatures
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A 17th-century soul and a girl with a flying coatRundell has spent her Oxford academic career inside John Donne’s work, completing a PhD on his literary afterlives and writing a biography that won the 2022 Baillie Gifford Prize. One of his least-finished poems, ‘Metempsychosis’ (1601), imagines a single soul migrating through different bodies across centuries, watching humanity from the inside. That premise refused to leave her, and eventually became the question the whole series is built around.
What if a soul entered a body and was eternal and with every death it was reborn? What would it think of us? Would they say mankind is not worth the harm they have wreaked upon themselves, or would they say despite its horror the miracle is greater? This is the debate of the book.
Before any world existed on the page, before the 34 islands of the Archipelago, a hidden realm where mythological creatures survive in secret, had a name or a map, Rundell had a single physical image that the rest of the book would have to be large enough to contain.
I knew that I wanted a world that would be huge enough for a flying girl to belong with ease.
She conceived the idea in 2016 and signed the contract the day before her 30th birthday. UK publication followed in 2023, seven years after that first image of a coat and a girl and the drop of the wind.
Rundell connects the series to Vanishing Treasures, her nonfiction book of essays on endangered real animals, and the link is not metaphorical. The Archipelago’s fading glimourie, the magic that sustains its creatures, is a direct translation of a crisis she considers the defining moral fact of her generation.
Climate change is the most urgent moral question that we face as a generation.
How she wrote it
Two hundred hours in archives, then the art of leaving spaceMost novelists building a fantasy world invent its creatures from scratch. Rundell went the other direction, spending an estimated 200 hours in libraries before writing a word of narrative, pulling from medieval bestiaries, 14th-century manuscripts, and Pliny the Elder’s Natural History. What she found, she then deliberately bent.
I spent many wonderful hours in libraries researching the magical creatures that we were once absolutely convinced were real. I read mythical encyclopedias, old manuscripts... and ancient histories, all to create a file with hundreds of pages of notes about my creatures.
Her previous novels could name a real city and let readers fill in the rest. The Archipelago offered no such shortcut. Every detail had to be laid down from nothing, which demanded a discipline her earlier books had not required. Her early draft ran too long, and she cut it back to what she called ‘just enough.’
With fantasy, you cannot just say, ‘Imagine Paris.’ When you are inventing something utterly new, you have to lay it out with far more clarity and care.
Economy of description was only half the problem. The other half was making the creatures feel tactile rather than illustrated. The map of the 34 islands went through three years of revision as she worked out which species could share territory, and she corrected received mythology where she thought it wrong: traditional lore places dragons in cold caves, but she noticed they are cold-blooded and would actually seek warmth, so her dragons live close to the sun.
I spend a lot of time trying to work out how you make it feel like the griffin is actually in your arms, and the unicorn’s breath is on your face, and the dragon’s claw is against the edge of your palm.
Before each writing session she looks for a text to pitch her ear at the right register. The practice is less ritual than calibration: different emotional scales in the book require different tuning instruments, and she has specific poets for specific temperatures of feeling.
I find that poetry has that mixture of language and music, which can liberate your own imagination into slightly different tones.
She maintains a document she calls the ‘Encyclopedia Glimouriana,’ with details on every island, character, and rule in the series, not to deploy it all in the books but so the world stays solid in her own mind while she writes.
Mal, the novel’s protagonist, is a girl who grows up in the Archipelago and must cross into the human world for the first time. Writing her turned out to be something other than a craft problem.
Writing Mal was one of the great pleasures of my professional life because I just loved writing a girl who is stubborn and alone, but ready to rise to that which the world asks of her. That was a real joy.
The personal thread
What grief taught her about loss being permanentRundell was ten years old when her foster sister Alison died of a congenital illness at sixteen. She calls it the great, lasting tragedy of her life, and she discusses it with deliberate restraint, resisting any too-neat line between that loss and the themes of the book. But the line is there.
I loved her wildly, and in losing her I learned that things that you love can be lost.
The Archipelago is a world where the fading glimourie threatens to make every magical creature permanently extinct. Rundell is careful not to claim Alison’s death as the source of that premise. But she does describe what that grief opened up in her, and the vocabulary is exactly the vocabulary of the book.
Ali’s death meant that I discovered the thing that everyone discovers, but I discovered it a little younger, that grief is enormous and all-encompassing and absolutely intrinsic to human experience. It cannot be outrun or escaped.
On what’s at stake
Fantasy as philosophy with better lightingRundell spent years as an academic before she was a novelist, and the question of what fiction is actually for, as distinct from what it entertains, runs through everything she says about this book. When she reached for a definition of the genre at the British Book Awards, she reached for philosophy.
I think of fantasy as it’s like philosophy’s more gorgeously painted cousin, you know, it is a way of telling them, this is the world you live in. But here it is, writ a little larger. [paraphrased from audio]
One scene she returns to when discussing what the book is arguing: the Sphinx Naravarala tells Christopher, one of the two child protagonists, to take care that swifts and hedgehogs and panthers don’t become as mythical in his world as unicorns are in the Archipelago. The scene is the book’s thesis in miniature, and she describes what she hopes it does to a reader’s attention afterward.
Imagination is the tool of ethics. It is the condition precedent for political change, for imaginative love.
What she wants us to sit with
Wonder as rehearsal for the world outside the bookShe is blunt about the order of priorities: the adventure comes before any argument the book wants to make, and a moral that costs the story its grip is a moral that has failed on its own terms. But she is equally clear about what the story is, underneath its plot.
I don’t think it’s fair to offer children a story and then bludgeon them with a moral. But the book is, in part, about the threat of endangerment: about the idea of fighting with everything you have to protect that which is vulnerable, because what is lost is lost forever.
She also wanted the book to be honest with children about what being alive actually costs, refusing the version of children’s literature that keeps difficulty at arm’s length. The list she offers is long because she means it to be complete: nothing is left out of the category of being a person.
To grieve is to be a person, to lose is to be a person, to suffer and to be spiteful and jealous and stupid is to be a person and also to be brave and funny and bold and generous to your bones is also to be a person. I want kids to understand that quite complicated idea: life is beautiful, life is difficult.