Seven unusual facts about Elly Bangs, author of Unity

1. I'm here because of a dream. I spent nearly 15 years writing the first draft of Unity, but I didn't originally intend to share it publicly. Shortly after finishing it, however, I had a dream that gave me specific instructions for querying a certain literary agent, who I had not heard of in waking life. So upon waking I looked him up, I wrote him the first query letter I had ever written to any agent, he sold my novel, and here I am.

2. One time I rode a bicycle from Seattle to Panama. Six months, ten thousand kilometers, just me and two wheels and the highway shoulder. I sang to myself a lot. It was a very weird thing to do, and I received well-deserved weird looks in eight different countries for doing it, and I won't be doing it again -- but I'm glad I did. It introduced me properly to the size of this planet and the wonders of its people.

3. I think the world is ending. For as far back as I can remember, I've had the constant feeling that the world we know is crumbling right around us. I think a lot of people my age can relate, and my novel aims to give voice to that dread. We're living through runaway climate change, so Unity takes place in underwater cities and scorched wastelands. In the USA we're living through the collapse of an empire, so Unity takes place in a future where the nation balkanized and faded into history long ago. We're living through a moment of intense isolation and estrangement, so Unity is a story about damaged people trying to connect with each other across a vast and dangerous realm where death lurks around every corner. However--

4. I'm hopeful- I have to be. I spent a lot of my teens and twenties in a state of fairly perpetual despair, and I learned a lot from that. It's easy to throw the word "hope" around like a vague platitude; a shallow faith that our problems will solve themselves, or that someone else will solve them for us -- but what I think we're really talking about, when we talk about hope, is a refusal to succumb to learned helplessness. There are cracks in the doom looming over us, and hope is the will to find them and pry them open even a little wider. Good things are happening. People are helping each other. People are standing up for themselves. Nearly everything I write is an attempt to recognize the doom, but also its cracks.

5. I'm trans. I'm a queer transgender woman. It's the least interesting fact about me, and I tend to forget about it entirely, but I thought I should mention it because it's great.

6. I cannot be stopped. I sincerely hope you like my debut novel, Unity. And I hope you like the next thing, and the next. I have some short stories out too -- some serious, some funny, some both. You can find an index of them on my website, elbangs.com.

7. And I'm not alone. Writing can be a very solitary undertaking. It was for me, for years. I had the privilege of attending Clarion West in 2017, and the lasting friendships I made there changed my life. That's only one of countless ways to meet other writers. The community of science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers is full of superb human beings, and the best advice I could give any creator or fan would be to make friends with them and keep in touch. That, and if you ever happen to have a prophetic dream that tells you exactly how to publish your book, listen to it.