Enjoy this guest post by RB Kelly about the kick ass heroine she needed to write.
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The first woman I ever met — my mother — was a real-life kick-ass heroine, and I think it’s the greatest gift she could have given me.
I was born in Belfast in the late 1970s, at the height of the civil disturbance known as The Troubles. A background noise of violent conflict was my baseline. It was a weird way to grow up, but, with hindsight, the weirdest part of all is the fact that it felt normal at the time. I’m not going to claim that it hasn’t screwed me up a bit, but I got off pretty lightly, all things considered. A lot of that is down to my parents—and in particular my mother—refusing to allow a broken society to break their kids.
So when it came time to write Danae Grant, the protagonist of my Clarke Award-shortlisted debut novel Edge of Heaven, she was never going to be less than a kick-ass heroine herself.
The world in which Danae operates is as dangerous as the world in which I grew up. Against this backdrop, Danae lives with a dangerous secret that will end her life if it ever gets out.
I wanted Danae’s strength to feel authentic; to be more than a hollow archetype. Part of this flows from my background in film and gender theory, where, in the course of researching my PhD, I encountered all manner of Strong Female Characters™ whose strength is largely performative and ends up subtly undermining their agency. Too often, these heroines end up being rescued by their (male) love interests.
In Edge of Heaven—and its sequel, On the Brink—Danae does the rescuing.
Danae’s strength is both physical and emotional. Technically, she’s superpowered, but her abilities come with significant risks in the politically charged world she inhabits. A lifetime spent in hiding from a world that rejects her has left her without a model for the positive change she can make through her difference. Part of her journey is to understand, accept, and celebrate her strength.
I didn’t realize I was writing about my neurodivergence and gender identity until much later, but Danae’s journey towards self-acceptance ultimately mirrors my own.
When I started writing Edge of Heaven, I was fifteen years old. The 1994 ceasefire that called an end to the worst of the Troubles had not yet happened. I didn’t have the language yet to describe myself as genderqueer, nor did I understand that I was neurodivergent—all I knew was that I was different, and that different did not feel safe.
A lot of research exists that discusses how societies in conflict tend to devolve into more rigid and traditional gender paradigms. Some of it talks specifically about how this happened in Northern Ireland, and how we’re still—more than 25 years after the Good Friday Agreement—dealing with the fallout from that. This, I think, is part of the reason I felt the need to bury these core parts of who I am, but my kick-ass mother (although I didn’t talk to her about any of this) continued to embody a doctrine of acceptance that was at odds with our wider society. It didn’t get us invited to many friends’ houses, put it that way. But it managed to keep that buried spark alive until I was ready to rediscover it.
I’d love to claim that my “aha!” moment happened while I was writing Danae, or that she was the reason I’ve come to understand myself so much better. The truth is, that moment wasn’t a moment; it was a series of self-realizations, and they didn’t happen until Edge of Heaven was already in print. It’s only now that I can look at this woman I’ve written, this kick-ass heroine, and finally see that I was writing my own journey all along.
Writing Danae has helped me understand and love my difference. I may not be superpowered, but she and I share a path: from emotional isolation to tentative steps towards trust; from wanting to disappear to stepping into the sunlight; from a learned script of self-rejection to tapping into depths of unanticipated strength. My mother was my first kick-ass heroine, but Danae is the kick-ass heroine my adult self needed to see. Her story illustrates that our differences can be both beautiful and powerful, and she helped me be my own hero.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
RB Kelly’s debut novel, Edge of Heaven, was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award. The sequel, On The Brink, was longlisted for the BSFA Award for Best Novel. Her short stories can be found in publications from around the world, including The Best of British Science Fiction, Aurealis, and Lamplight Magazine. She has a PhD in film theory and published her doctoral thesis with IB Tauris (now Bloomsbury) in 2014. In addition to her writing, she helps emerging authors find their voice as a creative writing teacher and mentor.
Website: www.rbkelly.co.uk
Facebook: facebook.com/RachaelKellyWriter
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rachael.b.kelly/
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ABOUT EDGE OF HEAVEN
2119: The bi-level city of Creo Basse towers over the wastelands of central France. Built as a permanent relocation centre for the dispossessed, Creo has become a hotbed of simmering resentment and unrest. The authorities keep tight control, not least because outlawed a-nauts (artificial humans) are known to hide among its citizenry.
In the dark, honeycomb districts of the lower city, Boston Turrow is searching desperately for black-market meds for his epileptic sister when he encounters one of the many ways Creo can kill a person. His unlikely rescuer is Danae Grant, a woman recently made homeless when the bloc she lived in was condemned. Danae knows people, Boston knows where she can stay…
The tinderbox that is Creo catches light when a deadly plague erupts among the populace. Is it really a terrorist weapon unleashed by the a-nauts as the authorities claim, or does that just hide a deeper, darker secret? Danae and Boston are determined to survive, if only to discover the truth; of course, that might be easier said than done…
RB Kelly’s stunning debut novel, Edge of Heaven, is the winner of the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair Award.
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ABOUT ON THE BRINK
The sequel to the Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlisted novel Edge of Heaven.
Luchtstad: the city in the sky. Beacon of hope. Place of refuge, of healing, of acceptance. At least, that’s what the rumours say.
Reborn as Françoise Marechal, Danae Grant is trying to build a new life as a post-etheric citizen and to disappear back into the cracks. Nothing and nobody will ever touch her again. She’s going to make sure of that.
Adam has been following a cold trail for the better part of three decades, ever since the love of his life was killed in the horrors that ended the a-naut Insurgency. He’s looking for the only other survivor of their group – the one person left who can tell him what really happened that day. Twenty-five years on, the trail stops at Luchtstad. Adam’s an older model and time is running out. This is his last chance to find the truth. In Danae, he sees a potential entry point into Luchtstad’s secretive a-naut community. In Adam, Danae sees the threat that could end her carefully reconstructed existence. And the city has one more act of unimaginable violence to throw at them before their journey is done…
The truth, when it finds them, is something neither one of them could have guessed.
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Other kick ass heroine posts by Beth Barany and by guest authors.
