Interview with K.J. Taylor

Authors of the speculative fiction variety are a close-knit bunch of people, and I’m proud to be a member of the community.

You’d think we’d be trying to climb over each other to get top of the Sales Rank Tree, but we’re all really good friends and love to see each other succeed. Genuinely.

That’s what I love about speculative fiction community – we all help and support each other, cheer each other on, and cry into shared cups when things go south. If only politicians acted that way.

I first met K.J. Taylor at Conflux (a Canberra-based writers’ convention) many years ago where she was excited to chat about her work during a kaffeeclatsch (group chat over coffee), and we’ve since become good friends.

Today I’ve invited her over to chat about her latest book, Shadow of the Skytree, an epic fantasy that’s uncomfortably reflective of today’s world, though it wasn’t intended to be.

What do you love most about Shadow of the Skytree?

I love the different cultures I came up with for the different races, and particularly the steampunk style humans, who ultimately turn out to be the most badass of the lot despite not having any magic.

Scenes wise, my favourite part is definitely the assault on the forest – the imagery of the burning trees was really vivid in my mind (…and depressingly topical given what went down in Australia not long after the book came out).

What prompted you to write about these particular characters in a fantasy setting?

It was a combination of two factors:

One, I wanted to do what I usually do, or try to, which was to take some fantasy tropes which annoy or bore me and see if I could do something different with them. In this case, the truly tiresome cliché of the perfect elven race, and its equally tired brother, fantasy worlds in which the humans are boring and weak and pathetic compared to the more special humanoid races around them.
The other factor, as lame as it sounds, was that I had a dream about a little gnome riding on a dragon and it was so damn charming I just had to do something with it.

What is it you bring to the genre that’s uniquely K.J. Taylor?

Well, it’s not exactly unique to me since others have done it too, but I would say the lack of clear-cut good guys and bad guys.

Even considering the monstrous things a certain group does in this book, they’re not really evil – they’re just scared, ignorant, and desperate. And no matter how far someone goes, it’s never too late to turn things around and try to seek redemption, even if deep down you don’t think you can ever really forgive yourself.

This last part was my favourite character arc by far, and feeds into the book’s themes of forgiveness and finding a way to start again.

Indeed the character who flat-out refuses to accept the idea of forgiveness is the one who ends up becoming what I consider to be the most hateful character in the book, and the one with the unhappiest ending.

I love that you’re clearly ahead of the curve when it comes to art reflecting world events. Where did the story’s main problem come from?

It’s downright scary how much of what I put in the book ended up parallelling real world events I could have had no idea were coming.

Not just a deadly disease, but a country torn apart by unreasoning fear, hatred and xenophobia, and a protagonist who sees all he knows and loves burn to the ground before his eyes.

As for how I came up with it, I knew that the central conflict would revolve around a horrible, calculated genocide of millions of people, but the question was how does one make that happen when you’re too few in number and too unskilled in fighting for direct warfare?

Deliberately infecting your victims with plague and then doing all you can to stop anyone from finding a cure felt like a clever tactic – not to mention that it’s incredibly evil and cowardly.

It’s a tactic us humans have used on each other plenty of times, of course; in medieval times it was quite common to toss plague corpses over city walls in the hopes of infecting the garrison.

Nowadays the notion of a weaponised disease is so embedded in people’s imaginations that it was inevitable that some would start pointing fingers when COVID-19 came along, convinced that it was grown in a lab and deliberately released to wipe us all out and/or destroy the economy.

How would you describe your perfect reader/fan?

Well, one can’t afford to be picky – as long as someone’s reading!

But I really do love and appreciate it when someone reads my books and also takes the time to show their appreciation.

A review, a comment on my author FB page, nothing fancy. I’ve only ever received one handwritten piece of fanmail, and it was so special I framed it.

If you could be anywhere right now, where would you be?

Sydney! Down at Darling Harbour, sitting outside a café with a glass of wine and watching the sea.

I’m not sure if I’d want to live in Sydney, but it’s my favourite little getaway spot, and for obvious reasons it’s been some time since I’ve been able to go there.

It’s on my list of things to do once it’s safe for non-essential travel (I have two different chronic health conditions, so where COVID-19 is concerned I’m playing it extra safe).

About K.J. Taylor

K.J. Taylor was born in Canberra in 1986, where she still lives to this day. She decided she wanted to be an author fairly early in life, and published her first novel with Omnibus Scholastic in 2004 when she was just eighteen. She went on to write the bestselling Fallen Moon trilogy a couple of years later.

You can find Shadow of the Skytree wherever you buy good books, including:

You can find K.J. at: