SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:
What if the survival of the 1960s U.S. space program was in the hands of a magic spell-casting, mystery-solving math genius? In her genre-bending new book, "The Starseekers," author Nicole Glover mixes fantasy with history as a brilliant aerospace engineer must figure out if a deadly accident in her research lab was actually murder and if it's all part of something bigger. She's fighting against dangerous curses and spells, but she's also a Black woman, fighting against racism in a world where Black people are protesting to demand their civil rights. Nicole, welcome to the program.
NICOLE GLOVER: Hi. Happy to be here.
MCCAMMON: So "Starseekers" is the fourth book in your Murder and Magic series, and your characters inhabit an alternate fantasy world. There are elements of reality and unreality. But the story is framed within the actual history of Black Americans' fight for freedom and civil rights. Just tell us more about this book, and I'm especially interested in how you decided to weave together these elements of reality with magic.
GLOVER: Oh, happy to. "The Starseekers," in many ways, is a long journey from my very first book, "The Conductors," where I - readers can first go into this alternate history with magic and all these things tied with all the great hits of the historical time periods. "The Starseekers" kind of builds upon that world, moving us from the 1870s to 1960s, where readers can see how much has changed since then and how technology interplays with the magic. But another aspect, always important for this series, was the historical aspect. I was very deliberate in setting the world in historical time periods. And even though there's some alternate history aspects in this book, especially "The Starseekers" having, you know, an actual Black astronaut, I try to play hard and true to the historical time periods and historical big moments because that was very important for me to highlight and really illuminate aspects of history we don't often talk about, especially in these days.
MCCAMMON: So as you're sort of toggling between magic and fantasy and on the other hand, you know, science and history, how did you decide what the blend should be between reality and fantasy?
GLOVER: Yeah, it's always one of those things I kind of get a feel of as I'm going through the story. Sometimes it's more I want to highlight the particular magic moment, or maybe sometimes I feel like, oh, I haven't really talked about magic for a while, so I should probably remind people this story is about fantasy. But I want to make the magic aspects of the world seem very natural. So I have things, for example, that the main character - she rides a broom around. So, you know, she - when she's at work, she stores her broom in the broom locker or there's, like, broom racks around. And just kind of make that feel like a natural part of things - and I think it's also kind of tied to my fact that I always regret that we don't live in the world with magic, so I try really hard to imagine what I'd like to see a world with magic in every aspect of things that's more overt.
MCCAMMON: I mean, sometimes it seems like the closest thing we have to magic is maybe technology. But, you know, throughout time immemorial, humans have sort of ascribed to things they didn't understand some kind of magic or mystery. How do you think about that?
GLOVER: I think because of the traditions of the past, it's very easy to assign magic to things because we don't know the answers and we don't know what forces are in work. So I think at that time, magic was the best go-to answer. And especially when you look in science fiction, where we have a blend of - where you have time travels, where we might go from people from the future to the past where, you know, they have technology as their magic - now, like, if somebody from even as far back as, like, the 1920s comes to our time period, they will see everything we have from, like, planes to our tablets, our phones as, like, some form of magic or illumination, which seem like a marvel.
MCCAMMON: I think about this all the time. I live in a house that's over 100 years old, and it's got, you know, like, old radiators now defunct in it and old oil heaters downstairs. And it's got, like, you know, the remnants of phone cords that were strung along the wall, and then we also have, like, an electric charging station in the front for the car. And, you know, like, the span of things that have happened in such a short time, like, I've had this exact thought. I mean, man, if somebody from 1920 came into this house, they just would not even believe the way that we live today in such a short time, really.
GLOVER: And it is really rapid. You know, we went from airplanes onto the moon within a lifespan.
MCCAMMON: Now, the main character in "Starseekers" is a young woman named Cynthia Rhodes, and she suspects that something sinister might be up at her NASA lab. But she is not your average amateur sleuth, and she's not your typical scientist. What kind of a character were you trying to create with Cynthia?
GLOVER: Yeah, Cynthia is kind of the legacy of a mystery-solving dynasty, so to speak, 'cause her great-great-grandparents have been doing it since the 1870s. And she's grown up around people who may not all be detectives and sleuths, but they are all interested in solving the unsolvable or the mysteries or the unique things that happen around them. And she's also grown up around adults, seeing the world, traveling, going on adventures. She's now in a place where she has to actually look out for much younger siblings and kind of create, like, a found family with her friends and cousins and things like that to kind of rebuild what she wants her life to be and figure out what's - kind of take charge of her destiny.
MCCAMMON: Are there things about Cynthia that you identify with?
GLOVER: I actually think she's probably the one the most like me character-wise, being slightly introverted, kind of having a small selection of friends that she kind of confides with and works around with and even the small things like, you know, enjoying cats. And it's one of those things you really don't plan. I always say that authors always put a little bit of themselves into the characters. And this one was kind of - accidentally kind of happened, and it works pretty well because a lot of these things that got me into this book, a lot of things I mention within "The Starseekers" are various things I'm fascinated with, and that all kind of bleeds together to kind of create a character who is similar to me, but not exactly, and that's some of the fun to kind of explore of, like, how I can bring certain aspects of my personality to her and also where she's different as well.
MCCAMMON: You know, you wrote about a time in 1964, a critical time, a tumultuous time in American history and Black history. What do you hope your readers will take away, you know, specifically from your sort of reimagining of this chapter?
GLOVER: Wants (ph) people to remember that even though 1960s, '64 in particular, had a lot of important, great things happening, that there's also life happening alongside of these things - that inside these big, real (ph) moments that we see in our history textbooks that there are smaller things of inner joys. It seems silly that's still going on alongside the things that we see ourselves in these times as well that history is happening around us, but life goes on within our - between our families, between our friends, and we use that to help us propel our interest into the future.
MCCAMMON: Nicole Glover is the author of the Murder and Magic series. Her new book, "The Starseekers," is out now. Thank you so much.
GLOVER: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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