My earliest memory of world events was the fall of the Berlin Wall. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1993, I’d learned to see Russia as something of a secret—something walled away and hidden, completely foreign to the American way of life, and yet a crucial mirror people liked to hold up to America, as if one nation couldn’t exist without the other. How could I not be fascinated by it, and hungry to learn more?I studied Russian throughout primary school and high school, and went on three study-abroad trips there, each time finding a completely different country around me. In 1997, everyone was flush with cash and frantically buying their way out of the mid-‘70s aesthetic that permeated the cities we visited. By 1999, the ruble had collapsed, and the people seemed to have settled in, dour-faced and weary, for another long winter. Then, in 2003, the economy was stabilized, but the attitudes were far closer to what I might have expected under the USSR. Putin was in charge now. America was not our friend. Russia could only rely on Russia.Since Putin’s rise to power, we’ve seen an overwhelming resurgence in Cold War chic—The Americans, Bridge of Spies, and so much more. The Russophile in me hates it—I want to see Russia grow and find its own feet again, and not have to define itself by what it opposes. But from a storyteller’s perspective, I couldn’t be happier. Polar opposites vying for supremacy? An uneasy stalemate that could so easily topple into war at any moment? That old, dangerous, beloved lie of spies—We’re not so different, you and I? The stories spawned by such a scenario are endless, and I want to explore them all!I set out to write my first novel, Sekret, by drawing on that perilous sense of too much power and energy spent on defying one’s enemy, and how that potential must be channeled somewhere. I chose 1963 because I felt it best represented the moment when the US and USSR were on equal footing—in technology and the space race, in their geopolitical stakes, in nuclear armaments—and the unease that came from not knowing who might win at any moment. Then I took that paranoia and dread that comes from daily life in a surveillance state and amplified it by giving my spies the power to read minds. Nowhere was safe for dissent—not even the space inside one’s own head.It’s that sense of parity and yet polarity that drove the story for The Witch Who Came In From the Cold when Max Gladstone and I first set our ideas to paper. For this project, though, we decided to play with the sense of allegiance people feel, and the dissonance that comes when two things you want desperately are diametrically opposed. My favorite character to write in Witch is Tanya, a fiercely loyal KGB officer whose inherited ties to the magical Consortium of Ice force her to decide which master she ultimately serves—magic, and possibly the fate of the world? Or Mother Russia and the Soviet cause?Espionage thrillers have a timeless appeal—it is the second-oldest profession, after all—and I’m delighted that spy tales are working themselves into ever more unusual genres. The Cold War, though, will always endure as a ripe setting for geopolitical conflict. I can’t wait to see what further twists and turns the added element of magic will offer us as we continue our spy-witches’ tale.
