Barely more than a year later, and the literary mash-up craze started by Quirk Books has boomed into a monster of its own undoing – or so it seemed. Sifting through piles of Vampires & FILL-IN-THE-BLANK titles rushed onto shelves to entice teenage girls and Twilight-loving moms is something of a daunting task. Thankfully, in a literary niche that is now nearly saturated, Quirk still holds on to the golden goose.
Ben Winter’s Android Karenina – yes, Leo Tolstoy – takes the monster mashing to a place rarely touched by wannabes: science fiction. The shift from classic horror to sci-fi is refreshing, and more importantly, necessary to rejuvenate what is now, somewhat of a tired trope. Android Karenina is Tolstoy’s sweeping epic told with a steampunk twist. Winters cleverly takes the major philosophical issues of Tolstoy’s world and gives them a sci-fi polish: The relationship between the classes is shifted to the question of the relationship between man and machine. That’s right, robots.
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I was able to chat with Winters, who also penned Sense & Sensibility & Sea Monsters, about the new title, out in bookstores today ($8, Amazon).
Allie Townsend: How did the decision to make the jump from Jane Austen to Leo Tolstoy happen? It’s a pretty big leap.
Ben Winters: It is a pretty big leap and they’re obviously two very different writers, but with this kind of writing, this mash-up genre, there are certain authors that you can do and certain authors that you can’t. Austen worked so well because her writing style is so elegant and classy and has the exact kind of tone that we think of as high-minded, an upper-class feeling. Adding all of this ridiculous stuff, all of the violence and grossness, that contrast is just so delicious.
Tolstoy just felt perfect for various reasons. He’s not the type of writer who’s doing a lot of silly stuff. His characters are very serious. It wasn’t so much trying to add funny on top of funny, it was more of adding things that were outrageous or surprising without trying to be overtly outrageous. There’s something about Tolstoy. It’s so big. It’s so epic. If you ever talk about Tolstoy, that’s one of the first words that comes up. Epic. I guess I was intrigued by the possibility of taking that epic scale and matching it with the epic scale of classic science-fiction writing: Universes filled with inventions, filled with ideas. That’s what’s so appealing about classic science fiction and in a weird way, it’s what’s so appealing about Tolstoy.
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AT: How then, did you decided to mash-up Tolstoy? Why Anna Karenina and robots?
BW: The title was so great, it was irresistible. We were talking about a bunch of possibilities for the next book and Android Karenina was a title that had been suggested early on. It was so deliriously ridiculous that you wanted to find a way to make a book out of it. I know this is audacious to say, but Anna Karenina is widely recognized as one of the best, if not the best, novels that has ever been written. It’s so beautiful and so big and has so many ideas and the story is so compelling and the characters are so real, I couldn’t resist. I couldn’t resist seeing if we could pull this off with a novel that is beloved, and beloved for a reason.
In terms of why science fiction, even when I was writing Sense & Sensibility & Sea Monsters it was still monsters. I sort of knew that if we were going to do this again, I would want to take a leap and while still combining a classic novel with a new genre, I would want to do it with a new genre and move away from classic horror and do science fiction. It just seemed natural for the Quirk Classics series to do sci-fi.
AT: One of the toughest things about getting through Anna Karenina for the first time is just keeping track of the characters themselves. The names are difficult to grasp, and you went a similar way with the names of the robots. Were you worried this would confuse readers?
BW: What Tolstoy does is take us into the minds of his characters and there will be pages and pages of characters talking to themselves, trying to figure things out, reflecting on their own emotions. I thought it would be interesting to create for each of these characters, a companion robot. Each of them have their own personal friend/ servant/ confidant/ counselor that plays the role in their lives of someone you can bounce ideas off of. Then, I realized that each of those robots was going to need to come to life and be their own character and have their own nickname and have their own arch in the story. So I ended up adding a lot of new characters to this book, but they’re always with their respective owner, so hopefully it’s not too confusing. Basically, every time you see Anna Karenina, she’s accompanied by Android Karenina. The way these robots function in society, it becomes an extension of their owner.
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AT: As far as what these mash-ups are doing, I think Android Karenina might actually appeal to the academic crowd. I’m not sure I would ever say that about too many others.
BW: I’m glad to hear you say that, because I’d like to think it’s at least possible. I’ve tried to lend an intellectual spirit to the book. Again, there’s a lot of space in the original given over to discussion, arguments about politics, people wrestling with their relationship with God and what role should religion play in public life and then there’s the women question: How should marriage be? What role should women play in society? And granted, my book is not as long as the original, but it’s got philosophical questions: People stop to wonder, Is what we’re doing right? Are we giving too much power to machines? I hope that these questions spill over into Android Karenina because at the end, the relationship between man and machine comes to a crisis.
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AT: The technology in the book is really interesting to me. How did you conceive it?
BW: The first thing I did with this book, aside from re-reading Anna Karenina was re-reading a lot of classic source material, a lot of early science-fiction, Jules Verne, one of the books in the original Wizard of Oz series called Tick Tock of Oz. I tried to read science fiction that was if not from Tolstoy’s period, near Tolstoy’s period. I also read a lot of contemporary science fiction and then I read a lot about robotics. I checked out books, emailed with a few professors of robotics. I wanted to get the vocabulary right. I wanted to feel like the words I was choosing were real. Some of it is Russian, some of it is made-up sci-fi terminology of my own. In the end, I want the reader to feel like it’s one fluid world instead of a mish mash of influences, with occasional peeks of Tolstoy’s original. I think it all feels like one, cohesive piece, the same as if you picked up an original science-fiction novel.
AT: I’ve read quite a few of these mash-ups and authors always seem to take a different approach. I’ve read through books that go for pages without making a change. How did you handle adapting the original version?
BW: There aren’t that many passages in Android Karenina that are wholly unchanged. There are some stretches where you’ll find only a word or two changed, but once you make as radical a change as underlining this whole novel with this society in which exists this advanced set of technological limitations, based on the discovery of an alloy called groznium under the Russian soil, that has allowed us to do things that Tolstoy could have never imagined. Once you make a change as dramatic as that, it has to flow through nearly everything that happens. It would be strange if there were parts of the book that were untouched by that.
At the same time, what I really hoped to do was preserve the flavor of the original. The parts of the book that don’t need to be changed, I don’t change them. There’s a long, beautiful stretch of Anna Karenina were Levin is awaiting the birth of his son. His wife is in labor and he’s pacing around and every time the doctor speaks, his heart jumps in his chest because he’s terrified and he’s ecstatic and he’s in love and he’s praying. And I didn’t change it that much because I didn’t need to. I feel that whether a man is living in 1870s Russia or in contemporary America, or even 200 or 300 years from now when these technologies might actually exist, he’s still going to feel that same cocktail of emotions when his wife is delivering their child.
But other things, like earlier in the book when Levin is first courting his wife-to-be, Kitty, in Tolstoy’s book it is at an ice-skating rink. In my book, more advanced technology exists and it’s called a skate maze, where the skates hover a quarter-in. off of the ground because they’re Polaroid magnets, so you’re skating off of the ground. In that sort of scene the emotions and relationships are the same, but everything else is different.
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AT: Personally, do you think you’re done with Jane Austen?
BW: Well, never say never. I loved writing that book. Sea Monsters was a delightful experience. The prose was so good that just getting the chance to re-imagine it was priceless. I would be surprised if I were to go back to that well, just because there are so many writers out there. It’ll be interesting, if I am to do another one of these books to see which other books are out there.
I don’t want to say anything. I’m not working on anything right now, but I know that Quirk is the originators of this idea and I think they’re doing the best job of keeping the mash up novel, doing it properly and I think they’re going to be doing some more, but beyond that I can’t really say.
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