Arkady Martine is the author of the Teixcalaan series, the novella Rose/House, a multitude of short stories, and various other science fiction, fantasy, & horror. She is also Dr. AnnaLinden Weller, who is a Byzantinist, a climate & energy policy analyst, and a city planner. She is currently the policy director for the New Mexico Energy, Minerals, and Natural Resources Department, where she works on climate change mitigation, energy grid modernization, and resiliency planning. Her debut novel, A Memory Called Empire, won the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novel, and its sequel, A Desolation Called Peace, won the 2022 Hugo Award in the same category. Arkady grew up in New York City, and after some time in Turkey, Canada, Sweden, and Baltimore, lives in New Mexico with her wife, the author Vivian Shaw. “Three Faces of a Beheading” is her fourth appearance in Uncanny, an intricately structured story that examines the nature of historical narrative.
Uncanny Magazine: This is a powerful story of empire and rebellion, history and truth. What was your starting point or inspiration for this story?
Arkady Martine: I think I actually wrote about it in an offhand post on Bluesky, the day I started it, which I will reproduce here for posterity:
- attempt to finish reasonable short story with like, a plot
- NOPE FUCK YOU, YOU’VE FORGOTTEN HOW
- sit disconsolately on floor
- think about “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” & also BURNING BRIGHT & one of your own unpublished academic articles
- 500 words of gonzo stunt-writing in 20 minutes
So, to elaborate slightly, since that’s…well. Functionally a shitpost, and not exactly informative—what happened to make “Three Faces” the story I wrote was that I was desperately trying to figure out how to write short fiction again, after years of writing novels and novellas and also having a day job that devours my ability to spin narratives because the day job is, in fact, narrativespinning live and without a net. I’d written a whole bunch of bad stories that had story-shape to them: characters in a situation with a problem, you know the drill. Except none of them were live, none of them had anything in particular to say, and I was stuck in an extremely unpleasant and emotionally paralyzing fashion.
When you’re that stuck you start thinking about why, and one of the whys I kept skirting around and shuddering away from was how I felt about being an artist during a genocide, namely the current war Israel is conducting in Palestine. “Three Faces of a Beheading” isn’t about that war, but it’s about that feeling. The flinch and terror and wanting desperately to say something anyway. Have I mentioned I am Jewish? I am. Free Palestine.
“Three Faces” is in some senses an exorcism of paralysis. I ended up giving myself absolute creative freedom, freedom to do what I sometimes call “art bullshit”—I think that there’s four or five POVs in this story, and very few of them are anything like the standard-practice tight third person. For example. But also creative freedom to talk myself into picking up tools I had put down—the academic discourse of empire—and inspirations I have been carrying around for a long time, like Melissa Scott’s BURNING BRIGHT, an amazing novel from which I stole some of the multiplayer RPG in the center of “Three Faces.” (I didn’t steal anything from Borges but permission to be weird as hell, since one of the best short fiction writers this universe has produced certainly was.)
All that and talking myself into approaching what I apparently needed to write about genocide and complicity. Even if I did it sideways and half in second person.
Uncanny Magazine: “Three Faces of a Beheading” elegantly combines several styles of writing—immersive descriptions of scenes within the game and informal narrative interspersed with formal academic text, complete with footnotes. What drew you to this structure?
Arkady Martine: I love structure, and structure games, and the freedom that writing short fiction allows me to play with unusual forms. (I could try to work a structure like “Three Faces of a Beheading” has at longer length, but it would be a lot for the reader, and probably an unnecessary self-indulgence on the part of the writer.) And, as I said above, I was trying to take all of the stops off my own process and get through some paralysis while writing this piece. Structure is one of the ways that I find freedom and expansiveness. It is a form of play.
Also, all the academic text is text I genuinely wrote, for an academic book project that is almost certainly never going to see the light of day. I’m genuinely delighted to get some of it out in the world anyhow.
I’m also very interested in cut-up and juxtaposition as techniques: putting unexpected elements next to one another creates powerful effects for the reader. (I didn’t use my Oblique Strategies deck for this story, but if I had, the card would have been abandon normal instruments).
Uncanny Magazine: What was the most challenging part of writing this story? What was the easiest part?
Arkady Martine: Writing it at all was the most challenging part. Trusting myself that I knew what I was doing somewhere, even if I had to relinquish a lot of control over my own processes to get there. In a way, what I was trying to do was to convince myself that I was capable of finding joy in creation again.
The easiest part was the scene with the targeted advertising, which I wrote in about ten minutes. That store exists. It really does sell only those three things. (And, that scene was when I let myself fall all the way into the imagery and invent new divinatory signifiers, and who doesn’t want to do that?)
Uncanny Magazine: If the game in the story was available to you, which character would you most want to play? Do you enjoy gaming (virtual environment or otherwise), and if so, what are some of your favorite games?
Arkady Martine: Hilariously, I am a very terrible gamer and play almost no games. On the other hand, several of my dearest friends are game writers, and I have spent many extremely pleasant hours getting deep into the weeds on ludonarrative theory with them. So I’m…game-adjacent, I guess? I have played and deeply enjoyed Sunless Sea, and some strictly text-based games in Twine or Choice of Games engines—but my gaming experience is primarily mediated through fanfiction or people talking about the stories of games they’ve liked.
Literally everyone keeps telling me to play Disco Elysium, and the next time I have fifty hours of free time I am going to try it again.
As for the game in the story, I actually know relatively little about it beyond what the protagonist of “Three Faces” tells us. There’s the Soldier, and the Rose, and I would probably as a beginner play the Rose (she’s the easy archetype for me, I’m always writing poet-diplomats), but I suspect there are other characters with other stories that might end up calling to me more. Eventually.
Uncanny Magazine: Who are some of your literary influences? What is something you’ve read recently and enjoyed?
Arkady Martine: I had the pleasure of describing my style as “what happens if you put C. J. Cherryh and Guy Gavriel Kay in a blender and told the result to write a William Gibson story.” That’s some of it. But for “Three Faces” I really do want to call out Melissa Scott and her BURNING BRIGHT, without which this story wouldn’t exist. I read that book far too young—I was nine—and fell blazingly, hopelessly in love with the character Illario Ransome, a.k.a. Ambidexter, in it. In some literary-influence ways I still am.
Right now I’m reading some rather different stuff, though. I’m taking a trip through spy novels. I just finished the fourth book of Mick Herron’s Slough House series—the ones the show is based off of, and no spoilers, I’m saving it for when I run out of books—and I am so unbelievably impressed with some of the craft work Herron pulls off. It’s a masterclass and also compulsively readable.
Uncanny Magazine: What are you working on next?
Arkady Martine: A spy novel, actually. Which is part of why the Herron, above—but also because I’ve been approaching a real spy novel sideways for a very long time, and I think I might finally have both the depth and the range as a writer to pull off the kind of thing I want to do. It’s a science fantasy—magic and science-fictional elements—and it starts with a man in a high tower receiving a note from someone he is absolutely sure is dead.
Uncanny Magazine: Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us!
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