James Bow
James Bow writes science fiction and fantasy for both kids and adults. He’s been a fan of science fiction since his family introduced him to Doctor Who on TV Ontario in 1978, and his mother read him classic sci-fi and fantasy from such authors as Clifford Simak and J.R.R. Tolkien. James won the 2017 Prix Aurora Award for best YA Novel in Canada for Icarus Down. By day, James is a communications officer for a charitable land trust protecting lands from development in Waterloo Region and Wellington County. He also loves trains and streetcars. He lives in Kitchener, Ontario, with his two kids, and his spouse/fellow writer/partner-in-crime, Erin Bow.
Marina Raydun: Congratulations on the new edition of The Night Girl! How does it feel to see the book come “home” to Shadowpaw Press and reach a new generation of readers?
James Bow: Thank you! I’m amazed at the work Ed has done with Shadowpaw Press, making waves on the Canadian literary scene and supporting Canadian authors, getting Canadian books into the hands of more Canadians, while also giving Canadians exposure to the world market.
I’ll always be indebted to Kisa at my first publisher for bringing The Night Girl into the world, but moving things to Shadowpaw not only gives The Night Girl a new lease on life, it does feel like coming home. I’m only half joking when I say that the new edition is “now with Canadian spelling”. I’m genuinely pleased to have more letter u’s back in my book. We need to tell more Canadian stories, and Ed at Shadowpaw is making this happen.
MR: The Night Girl blends urban realism with fantasy creatures like trolls and goblins—right in the heart of Toronto. What inspired you to bring mythological beings into such a contemporary, Canadian setting?
JB: The roots of The Night Girl go back to 2003. While you wouldn’t think of it considering the slow pace of subway construction in the city, Toronto has a lot of things under construction, with a lot of projects digging deep into the bedrock. At the time Erin and I had recently seen The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, and Erin suggested I consider a story set in Toronto where, like in Khazad-Dum, people had dug too greedily and too deep and unleashed… something.
I didn’t go with quite that story idea (though some elements do show up), but it got me thinking about Toronto’s underground, and how much of the city is hidden from us, both physically, and by our own perception filters, as we focus too hard on our destination to notice what’s immediately around us. Toronto has the largest contiguous underground shopping concourse in the world with its PATH network (Montreal’s la ville souterrain is bigger, but it’s in three separate sections), and it’s a maze down there. So many possible secret hideaways; definitely fodder for a story.
As for why goblins, trolls and faeries? There’s rich lore there, and I’d written it before growing up through fan fiction, and reading things like Emma Bull’s The War for the Oaks. The mix just felt right for Toronto. A lot of writing is doing that: what sort of different elements can you put together, that clash and resonate in interesting ways. It took a while to find the final story, but the elements that grabbed me at the start kept me hooked and exploring for the final resolution.
MR: Perpetua Collins is such a relatable heroine—young, ambitious, trying to find her footing. What drew you to tell her story, and how did her character evolve as you wrote the novel?
JB: I’ve heard it said that many characters are based on traits of the authors themselves, and that’s true some of the time, but there’s also the alter-ego; we put together a character based on the things that we aren’t, and it gives us something interesting to explore. Perpetua is my opposite in many ways, being a woman who addresses the world far more forcefully than I could.
I generally like writing for strong female protagonists. You see it in Frieda and Adelheid Koning in The Sun Runners, and you see it in the first trilogy I wrote, starting with The Unwritten Girl. Rosemary Watson goes through three books, turning from 12 to 18 over the course of the series, and coming into her own through her adventures. There may be a bit of a through-put between Rosemary Watson and Perpetua Collins, although I think Perpetua puts up a stronger front and takes riskier leaps.
Perpetua’s character did change over the course of the writing, as I worked on figuring out whether this book was Young Adult or not. Though I write a lot of YA, I don’t set out to write Young Adult novels; I just like to tell a particular story, and the coming of age story is a compelling narrative that happens to come up a lot in YA. When I started writing The Night Girl, Perpetua was 19, and a recent high school graduate, but as I wrote the story, I ran into difficulties. Editors said that 19 was too old for a YA protagonist, but noted that aging her down would raise big questions about why she wasn’t in school, and how could she hold down a job so young? I also found that teen readers weren’t as interested in the office humour of the story, though twenty-somethings loved it. In the end, I aged Perpetua up to twenty-one, and moved the book into New Adult territory. Perpetua now has three years of University behind her and a few jobs under her belt — some of which she doesn’t want to talk about.
MR: You’ve said the book is “fun, funny, and heartwarming,” but it also explores themes of visibility and belonging. What deeper ideas or questions were you hoping readers would reflect on beneath the humor and fantasy?
JB: I seem drawn to stories that present themselves as light-hearted, but which speak to deeper themes. A Wrinkle in Time has some dark themes about confomity and authoritarianism, for example. The Night Girl tries to be funny (and, I hope, succeeds) but it explores issues of racism and of marginalized groups struggling to make a living in a world that isn’t built for them.
I didn’t set out for these things to be there, but they materialized nonetheless. Like a lot of my books, The Night Girl has a theme of identity and the struggles of finding your own, but as Perpetua figures out who she is and her place in the world she lives in, there comes a second question: how do you react to the world you live in now that you know who you are in it? One of the biggest struggles many of us have is just being themselves in this world that will judge you or ignore you or, in some cases, try to erase your existence.
That’s what The Night Girl matured into.
MR: You won the Prix Aurora Award for Icarus Down, and now The Night Girl continues to show your range across genres. What do you find most rewarding—and most challenging—about writing both science fiction and fantasy?
JB: Science Fiction and Fantasy have different expectations and different rules, but these rules have similarities that you can work and play with. You can’t use magic in science fiction, but you can fudge in some technology that works like magic, like ion-ships and faster-than-light travel. Rather than aliens, you can rely on mythological creatures in Fantasy. All that the readers ask is that the story be consistent to the rules you establish at the beginning of the story, or that have been established for you by the genre. Not all rules are made to be broken; they provide important structures that you hang your story on.
The rewards of science fiction and fantasy are that you are able to tell your stories in different settings or environments that simply aren’t available in contemporary fiction. I can have a book about goblin and troll office workers in downtown Toronto through urban fantasy, or I can jet off to Mercury or clear across the galaxy to tell the story of the challenges of behind human while struggling to survive in hostile environments.
But I find these settings and rules are flourishes, or aesthetics, and ultimately the stories are about the characters themselves, and the characters are people. How these people react to their settings and their stories should resonate with readers, who can see and sympathize with these people as not being that different from themselves. Thus The Night Girl and The Sun Runners become stories of women (Perpetua and Frieda) who come to understand their place and privilege in the world, and who grow into themselves by helping others with their own struggles. Icarus Down and The Night Girl become stories about finding out who you really are, and dealing with the uncomfortable truths about the world you live in.
MR: You’re also a communications officer for a land trust. Has your work in environmental preservation influenced how you approach world-building or the moral dimensions of your fiction?
JB: I am currently freelancing and supporting my wife Erin with her writing work, but working as a communications officer is a privilege for me because it pays me to write for a living. For most authors, writing is not a money-making enterprise, and we need a day job to pay the bills. Fortunately, I enjoy putting together press releases, creating newsletters, just making stuff, much more than I would doing Perpetua’s initial job of drafting invoices, answering phones and scheduling meetings.
Though, now that I think of it, a lot of that happened during my dayjobs as well.
I was equally privileged to work for non-profit agencies like the rare Charitable Research Reserve or the Canadian Water Network because these are easy causes to get behind. Unless we can find a balance between ourselves and nature, and unless we can protect the quality and quantity of our water, for everyone, the world is going to become a much harder place to live in. I’d hate to have the events that launched The Sun Runners happen here.
MR: You’ve been a Doctor Who fan since the late ’70s. Do you see any echoes of that storytelling tradition—hope, wonder, maybe a touch of whimsy—in your own writing?
JB: Oh, I am a writer because of Doctor Who. It’s as simple as that. When I was in my teens, I discovered fan fiction, and Doctor Who is one of the best franchises to explore that. The show’s writers may dress things up in science fictdion terms, throwing around phrases like “time machine” and “dimensionally transcendental”, but what it really comes down to is that it’s about a powerful wizard with a magical cabinet that can take him anywhere in the Universe. He is a portable hero who can be dropped into almost any genre of story. Writers have a whole bunch of characters, settings or plot ideas they can take off a shelf and write about, while exploring the craft of creating their own characters, settings or plots within that universe. Better yet, fan fiction has a fan community who will happily read your work and offer comment and encouragement, which gives you plenty of opportunities to improve, and a lot of incentive to keep writing.
There’s a lot of Doctor Who in The Sun Runners and Icarus Down. There may be some in The Night Girl as well, but I have other influences. I’ve already mentioned The Lord of the Rings and Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks. I was also reading a lot of Terry Prachett while writing The Night Girl, and he’s a master at incorporating whimsy, fantasy and humour into stories that have deeper undertones and commentary about the world.
MR: The novel first came out in 2019. When revisiting it for this new edition, did you feel tempted to change anything, or did you prefer to preserve it as a snapshot of the moment it was written?
Ed corrected the American spelling in the new edition. I didn’t change much else, because I felt that the story had reached its final form, and had become as good as it was going to be. I did ask to change a few details, like the number of homeless people in Toronto, and Perpetua’s rate of pay, as unfortunately, homeless numbers and prices have gone up considerably since 2019.
Although it’s not made explicit, the dates in The Night Girl correspond to 2018, and I was thinking about that year as I was writing the tale — it was the best mixture of near-future and contemporary as I could find. But the dates also correspond to the year 2029, and who knows: maybe the optimistic-with-fingers-crossed ending will fit well with that date when we get to it, given the way things are these days.
MR: Toronto feels like another character in the book. What makes the city such a compelling backdrop for fantasy, and what do you hope readers—especially Canadian ones—see differently after reading The Night Girl?
JB: Toronto is a diverse city with many possibilities for diverse and interesting characters. And as a Canadian city that, by and large, works, you aren’t obliged to tell a noir urban fantasy tale like Chicago tends to see, though Toronto can do noir, and Chicago’s not nearly as bad as its reputation sometimes presents. I also think, with fantasy — urban and otherwise — we look for unexpected things, or we like to explore hidden things. Not only are there plenty of hidden things to explore in Toronto, it’s an unexpected setting when it comes to urban fantasy. But if there can be werewolves in London and vampires in Sunnydale, there can be goblins and trolls in Toronto and Montreal, and as Canadians telling Canadian stories, we owe it to ourselves to make these contributions to the urban fantasy genre.
MR: Finally, what’s next for you? Are there more stories brewing in the Night Girl universe—or perhaps another world entirely waiting to be explored?
JB: The Night Girl is a stand-alone with a deliberately ambiguous ending, because the emotional climax of the story is the decisions that Perpetua, the goblins and the trolls make, with the impact of that decision being left to the imagination of the reader. I like stories like that, which offer a mixture of hope and trepidation for the resolution. If there’s a second book, it will deal with the human reaction to this world of goblins, trolls and faeries, and it will probably be called The Day Boy.
But right now I’m working on a companion YA SF novel to The Sun Runners called The Cloud Riders, set on Venus and Mars. It’s sort of an interplanetary Country Mouse/City Mouse thing, and I’m having fun with it. There’s also a near-future New Adult SF novel I’m working on about the impact to our identities in the face of rampant automation called The Curator of Forgotten Things. That one won’t have space colonies or space-opera settings, but be a bittersweet tale set in Halifax in 2040. That one intrigues me a lot. We’ll see how it goes.
You can find James Bow online at jamesbow.ca.