Premee Mohamed is a Nebula, World Fantasy, and Aurora award-winning Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta. She has also been a finalist for the Hugo, Ignyte, Locus, British Fantasy, and Crawford awards. Currently, she is the Edmonton Public Library writer-in-residence and an Assistant Editor at the short fiction audio venue Escape Pod. She is the author of the ‘Beneath the Rising’ series of novels as well as several novellas. Her short fiction has appeared in many venues and she can be found on her website at www.premeemohamed.com.
What is the first speculative fiction book you remember reading or the one that sparked your love for the genre?
I think if we can classify mythology as speculative, then definitely the illustrated book of Greek myths I think I still have in the house somewhere … if not, then one of the earliest was Lloyd Alexander’s ‘The Chronicles of Prydain,’ which of course at the time (aged ~6?) I didn’t realize was also based on mythology, mostly Welsh (the Mabinogion).
How would you categorize your work? Do you think the label of speculative fiction fits what you write? If so, what purpose does it serve for you?
I do like to say speculative fiction these days because I think it’s the widest umbrella for science fiction, fantasy, horror, and associated genres, and it’s narrower than saying ‘genre fiction,’ which also includes things like romance, thriller, and mystery. The problem with using ‘speculative fiction’ with some audiences though is that they don’t see it as a broad umbrella term but instead as the more litfic-y definition, which is “genre fiction that we’ve decided has some literary merit so we don’t want to call it science fiction or fantasy or whatever which is obviously pulp.” I mean it to be inclusive rather than exclusive, so I have to be careful which term I use depending on who I’m talking to. All I mean to say is that I’m not writing in a strict space of realism; I am speculating; I am writing the literature of the imagination.
Who are the authors you have looked up to who are doing the “good work?”
Definitely Ursula K. Le Guin, not only for her ability to write smoothly across and within genres and to include multiple genres gracefully within a single work, but because of the quality of her prose and her unparalleled ability to illustrate complex philosophical ideas through fiction. Octavia E. Butler for the same reason, N.K. Jemisin ditto—I think I’m still recovering from the Broken Earth series (my heart may never heal). Recently also I think Simon Jimenez and Vajra Chandrasekera are doing the good work, and I guess I’m defining that by the same standards as I do for Le Guin: work of effort, of talent, certainly of genius, but also experimental, boundary-pushing, unafraid to break rules and stretch the reader to the point of discomfort for the sake of beauty and truth. I look up to anyone who’s willing to look at the standard ‘formula’ for a genre book and say “Hmm, not this time.”
The Annual Migration of Clouds is a book that grapples with love, grief, belonging, responsibility. Reid works through all this while trying to do the work needed for her and her community to survive. How do you manage to write something that both carries significant weight but also significant hope?
I think the hope came more naturally for me than the weight, if that makes any sense? Being an environmental scientist, I talk about oncoming climate disaster as a series of escalating and disparate disasters that will combine and build off one another in some ways we can predict right now and some we can’t (tipping points, nonlinear acceleration of degradation, abrupt collapses of currents or patterns, etc). But being a realist I know that we as humans are very good at hitting the ground at high speed, rolling to reduce the impact, and getting up again, even if it takes a while. We’re good at returning to normal even if that means declaring something unexpected ‘the new normal.’ The weight was trickier because I wanted to keep the story very, very focused on Reid and her community, without giving into the temptation to preach or threaten or pontificate or lecture about the wider world outside it. I wanted a small, human story about disability, fear, love, and loyalty; I didn’t really want to write a messagey climate fiction book, per se. So I guess the balance was centred in a single person: Reid’s sense of the weight of her problems, versus the weight of her hope for the future.”
How do you see imagination, speculation, etc., as tools for building better worlds? How do you feel that you personally do this?
I guess I hope that those things are tools, but I don’t have much faith in it? Especially these days as I watch people with the most power and the most ability to build future worlds going out of their way to make everything worse for short-term gains (the energy-sucking expansion of ‘generative AI’ right now, for example). The people who are using imaginative fiction, storytelling, etc, as tools for building better worlds are being smothered right now under the weight and reach of people who aren’t. Optimistically I suppose I hope that there’s a building wave of people who are taking some positive messages from speculative works and who will be able to come to the forefront of changemaking later, and we just can’t see them right now. I don’t know that I’m providing people with any tools in my fiction, but I’m quite excited about my work with the Manufactured Ecosystems project (with the University of Guelph), which seeks to combine science and fiction to do exactly what we’re talking about here: generate imaginative tools for building better worlds.
A lot of your writing centers on the monstrous with even your website referring to you as an eldritch being. How do you find inspiration in monsters and the monstrous? What do you think draws so many of us to the monsters that lurk around or within?
I think that’s an interest that I’ve just kind of never outgrown from childhood! Going back to the book of mythology even, I’m like, who’s more interesting, Theseus or the Minotaur? Odysseus or Scylla? Hades or Cerberus? Nothing is more fascinating than a monster. Nothing could be better for fiction than presenting something or someone as monstrous. Monsters force us to think about power and powerlessness, predators and prey, about death and survival and what we would do if we were confronted with something that we could not rationalize away or deny its existence. Monsters are honest; I think a lot of us are drawn to that simply as a concept. Even if a monster manages to disguise itself as something else, which is often the case in fiction, we become far more invested in the story when its true identity is revealed. We want to see monsters, we want to read about monsters, because there is no better way to both examine what might be monstrous inside of us, and to examine those lines between what we’ve declared to be human and inhuman.
As a scientist and a writer whose fiction often centers on the natural world, how do you draw inspiration from the other life that shares this planet with us? In what ways do you commune with those around humans to write a story?
You’re absolutely correct that I like to draw inspiration from non-human lives for my stories! Again I guess this goes back to a lifetime of reading about animals, plants, geology, and science generally; if you grow up like that, you end up doing a lot of one-to-one comparisons of everything you learn later, in both directions. When I was taking economics in university, I always thought of resource usage in ecosystems; when I was taking biochemistry, I was always thinking about signaling systems in things like rhizomes and mycelia. Eusocial insect communities made me think of political organization systems, deep-sea migratory movements made me think of human nomadism. It’s not so much that I find it useful to remember that humans are animals (which we are, of course) but specifically that our cultural evolution has greatly outpaced our physiological evolution, and it’s easier to understand human behaviour when we keep that in mind. And what is fiction, after all, but continuous efforts to understand human behaviour?
The Kismet Magazine 
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