Hello and welcome to this Track of Words author interview – please join me in welcoming the fantastic Adam Oyebanji who’s here to chat about his brand new novel Esperance, which is out now from Arcadia Books! Back in 2022 I read Adam’s debut novel Braking Day, a fantastic ‘generation ship’ story that absolutely blew me away (here’s my review), and I’d been looking forward to his next SF novel ever since. I knew it was going to be great, and I was right – so I’m delighted to have the chance to chat to Adam about Esperance, about blending SF and mystery, and loads more!
ToW: To start things off, can you give us an overview of Esperance and what readers can expect from it?
Adam Oyebanji: Detective Ethan Krol is on the twentieth floor of a Chicago apartment building. A father and son have been found dead, their lungs full of sea water – hundreds of miles away from the ocean.
Abidemi Eniola has arrived in Bristol, England. She claims to be Nigerian, but her accent is wrong and she can do remarkable things with technology, things that her new friend, Hollie Rogers, has never seen before. Abi is in possession of a number of heirlooms that need to be returned to their rightful owners, and Hollie is more than happy to go along for the ride.
But neither Abidemi Eniola nor her heirlooms are quite what they seem. Abi is a target of Ethan Krol’s investigations, and Hollie’s life is about to become far stranger than she bargained for. In a clash of cultures, histories, and different ideas about justice, the consequences will be deadly.
This is a story about a cop who’s in way over his head, chasing a seemingly superpowered criminal dead-set on righting an old wrong, and a woman out of her own time and place prepared to do drastic things in expiation of sins that are not her own.
ToW: You’ve got a few key characters in Esperance – without spoiling anything, could you give us a quick sense of who they are and what readers might need to know about them?
AO: Let’s see. I suppose there are four key characters, three of whom are fixated on doing justice and one of whom is dragged along in the undertow. With regards to our ‘Justice League’, we have Ethan, a middle-aged, no-nonsense Chicago cop seeking justice for his two murder victims; Abi, who has come from someplace else for reasons intimately connected to Ethan’s crime scene; and Yemi, a man with a burning sense of justice denied, who’s determined to do something about it. What drives a lot of the book is the fact that while the versions of justice these three are interested in overlap, they are by no means compatible. Something, and someone, will have to give, the problem being that none of these three are particularly flexible in that regard.
As for the fourth, Hollie is a member of Gen Z struggling to make her way in difficult economic circumstances. She falls in with Abi because Abi is cool, has money, and appeals to her well-developed sense of adventure. What Hollie discovers to her cost, though, is that some adventures are far more dangerous than others.
ToW: I’d love to know what it is that appeals to you about writing thrillers and detective stories. Having read Braking Day I tend to think of you as an SF writer, but I know you’ve written a couple of mysteries before (A Quiet Teacher and Two Times Murder) so I assume it’s a genre you enjoy working in!
AO: I am an SF writer. Everything else is me faking it! I love all things SF and always have, but when it comes to stories, the ones that really land with me are the ones that have a sting in the tail. Most stings in the tail require some kind of mystery – not murder or crime, by any means, but something that gets uncovered when you get to the end. There’s one in George Eliot’s Silas Marner, for instance, that had me gasping out loud when I got there. I was also fascinated by a Star Trek: TNG episode called Clues, where Data insists that only a few moments have passed from the ship encountering a strange phenomenon, whereas a whole host of little inconsistencies lead the others to believe that Data is lying; the problem being that none of the crew can remember anything that contradicts him. Watching the crew unpick what had happened had me riveted. The ending was kind of lame, to be honest: it was the mystery that was compelling. So, even though Braking Day is an unapologetic space opera (albeit, I hope, a nuanced one), what the characters are doing for a lot of that book is unpacking a mystery, the ‘reveal’ being a big part of the book’s impact.
If I’m sitting in front of a blank screen, and if there’s something I want to talk about, and if I want to package that something inside a mystery because those are the stories I most enjoy, then the actual genre becomes secondary. The underlying subject matter of A Quiet Teacher required a real-world, crime novel setting. Similarly, what I’m trying to talk about in Esperance doesn’t lend itself to deep space, hence the SF/crime/thriller format you’ve been kind enough to read.
ToW: Having written those real-world mysteries before, how did you find writing a book, in Esperance, which combined both mystery and SF?
AO: I had an absolute blast! I had actually tried not to write A Quiet Teacher because I saw myself at the time as an SF writer and I don’t have a deep background in crime novels. (Crime writers, by the way, love crime-fiction quizzes when they get together. You do not want me on your team!) I was terrified of my own ignorance when I wrote that book. But once it was done and I realized I could carry it off, mixing SF and mystery in one story was something I knew I could do. Knowing I could do it, the actual writing was a wonderful experience from start to finish.
ToW: Looking back at the writing process, what do you remember being the biggest challenges of writing Esperance, not just blending genres but bringing in historical events and big (and dark) themes too?
AO: I have a mind like a great-aunt’s attic: full of all sorts of stuff piled together higgledy-piggledy. Being thus designed, having all the things you mentioned rubbing up against each other feels perfectly natural to me, so I’d be lying if I said that any of that brought me up short. The challenge was making it believable, which I think is always harder when you write anything with an SF element. You have to slide the reader into a world that the reader knows is an artificial construct without the reader feeling that it’s an artificial construct. If you can’t do that, you can’t write SF, and it’s a daunting challenge every single time.
ToW: Every great detective story obviously needs a great detective, and I really enjoyed reading about Ethan. He feels very real, and believable to me – definitely not the genius, superhero sort of detective. When you were working on his character, what were some of your touchstones, and your aims for him as a protagonist?
AO: Thank you! I’m delighted that you were able to connect with him. To be honest, your question already nails what I was trying to achieve: that he be real and believable. I’m a lawyer by profession, so I’ve interacted with police officers a fair few times. They tend to be conservative with a small ‘c’, not prone to flights of fancy, and are often coarsened by the gritty nature of the work. Not all, obviously, but enough. I tried to replicate that in Ethan.
While absolutely not a genius, the other thing Ethan had to be was intellectually honest. He had to follow the evidence wherever it led, even if his mind didn’t want to go there. There is a scene deep in the book where Ethan finds himself in a basement in pursuit of his suspect. A less analytical officer would have (literally) lost the plot at that point because logic was pointing him towards something impossible. Ethan, reluctant though he is, acts as logic dictates and is able to move forward.
ToW: As your other POV character, Abi feels like a very different kind of character. I particularly like how easily distractible she is! Could you talk a bit about where she came from, and what it was like writing about her?
AO: Yes, Abi is a very different kettle of fish! Highly intelligent, extremely adaptable and, frankly, mischievous. In less trying circumstances I think she’d be a good laugh. I need to be careful about spoilers here, but it’s no secret in the book that she comes from somewhere else, a place with its own distinct culture and history. Because of that, I think there were two things that I felt were particularly important when writing her. The first was that she not be a victim. There’s way too much of that in our storytelling and it’s often demeaning, albeit unintentionally. The second was to remember that she’s basically a tourist. She’s come to a place she’s been hearing about her whole life, and it’s wonderful and exciting and different. Who wouldn’t be distracted? Imagine how we would be if the situation were reversed!
ToW: Abi has access to some very cool technology, and of course every SF reader loves a good bit of tech. How much fun did you have figuring out what she should use, and did you come up with anything that in the end you decided not to keep in the book?
AO: We love tech! SF without tech is like a birthday party without cake. Sure, you can do it: but why? It’s always fun figuring out how much and what sort of tech to bring to the page, and I had a blast here. I tried mostly to extrapolate from tech we already have so that it was ‘real-world believable’. The other challenge with tech in SF is that it not be all-powerful. As we should all know by now, tech invariably comes with limitations, and I’ve tried to reflect that in the book. I don’t remember the details but I’m certain I rejected certain gadgets on the basis that they were simply too much for the story. The other thing I wrestled with, almost from the first page, was Einstein and relativity. To junk or not to junk? As you’ve read the book and know how it ends, you’ll be aware that this is not a trivial question. I like to think I made the right choice.
ToW: I enjoyed the variation in tone and voice in Esperance – not necessarily just the protagonists, but the overall feel of the locations, switching between Ethan’s viewpoint in the USA and Abi and Hollie in the UK. Was that something you were conscious of while writing, maintaining a clear sense of identity for each element of the book?
AO: Thank you! I’ve lived in both places and they are different, so I’ve tried to reflect that in the writing. And then, when you layer the character’s perceptions on top of that, the divergence gets starker. Ethan is a police procedural type who mostly understands the world around him, Abi is an SF character who most assuredly does not. As a result, what they see and deem relevant is completely different, even when they’re in the same place at the same time.
ToW: Even more than most murder mysteries, it feels to me as though Esperance is one of those books which relies on keeping a few key pieces of information secret for as long as possible, so that when revealed they have the biggest impact. That seems like it must be pretty tricky to do as a writer, while still keeping the reader engaged – how do you go about finding that balance of maintaining interest and tension?
AO: That’s a really hard question! And it’s hard, I suspect, because I do it by feel. What would keep me engaged, how do I feel about this particular development? It’s very me-me-me and subjective, I’m afraid. But if I try and reverse engineer what I did, I think that first and foremost I tried to play fair by the reader. The reader doesn’t know certain things because Ethan doesn’t, or because they’re simply not the natural focus of Abi’s thought process. Her plan is her plan and what she’s really concerned about is the execution. The concealment from the reader then becomes a side-effect of who, what and where the characters are. Everything has to grow organically from what has gone before. If it doesn’t, the reader, who has been kind enough to give me four hundred pages of their time, is going to feel cheated – which I absolutely do not want!
ToW: You talk in the acknowledgements about how the historical inspiration for Esperance has been with you for a long time. How does it feel now this book is out, to have been able to take that nugget of inspiration and explore it through a story of your own?
AO: Absolutely wonderful! Some of this story is dark, obviously, but sharing it with the world has given me a paradoxical sense of uplift.
ToW: Finally, you had the chance to write about quite the range of locations in Esperance – if you had the chance to teleport to any one of them right now, which would you pick and why?
AO: It would be a choice between Edinburgh and Chicago. As I live in Edinburgh, teleporting doesn’t make a lot of sense, so Chicago it is. I lived in Chicago for many years and it is a fascinating part of the world. To me, far more than L.A. or New York, it is the archetypal American city, with all the good and bad that that implies. It is difficult to express in words how visually spectacular Chicago is. It rises up from absolutely nowhere on the Lake Michigan shoreline because someone decided back in the day that this was the place. Go visit! You won’t be disappointed.
***
Adam Oyebanji was born in Coatbridge, in the West of Scotland, and is now in Edinburgh, by way of Birmingham, London, Lagos, Nigeria, Chicago, Pittsburgh and New York. After graduating from Birmingham University and Harvard Law School, he worked as a barrister, before moving to New York to work in counter-terrorist financing in Wall Street, helping to choke off the money supply that builds weapons of mass destruction, narcotics empires and human trafficking networks. Braking Day is his first novel and was a finalist for the Canopus Award.
Find out more at Adam’s website.
***
Thanks so much to Adam for taking the time to chat to me for this interview, and to Ayo at Arcadia Books for organising everything! I hope you enjoyed the interview, and that it’s left you keen to read Esperance yourself. I absolutely loved it, and can’t recommend it enough!
Esperance is out now from Arcadia Books (and DAW in the US). Check out the link below to order* your copy:
If you enjoyed this review and would like to support Track of Words, you can leave a tip on my Ko-Fi page.
*If you buy anything using this link, I will receive a small affiliate commission – see here for more details.