Today’s Women in SF&F Month guest is Mia Tsai! Her debut novel, Bitter Medicine, is a xianxia-inspired contemporary fantasy book featuring a magical calligrapher descended from the Chinese god of medicine and a half-elf security expert working at the same agency. The Memory Hunters, her second novel coming out on July 29, is the first book in a science fantasy duology featuring an archaeologist and her protector that is described as a “mind-bending queer adventure for fans of Inception, Arkady Martine, Samantha Shannon, and Emily Tesh, asking: who has the right to remember?” I’m excited she is here today to discuss creating new settings without real-word prejudices in “Conflict and Discrimination in Secondary Worlds.”

About The Memory Hunters:

A reckless archaeologist uncovers an earthshattering heretical secret in this mind-bending queer adventure for fans of Inception, Arkady Martine, Samantha Shannon, and Emily Tesh, asking: who has the right to remember?

Kiana Strade can dive deeper into blood memories than anyone alive. But instead of devoting her talents to the temple she’s meant to lead, Key wants to do research for the Museum of Human Memory. . . and to avoid the public eye.

Valerian IV’s twin swords protect Key from murderous rivals and her own enthusiasm alike. Vale cares about Key as a friend—and maybe more—but most of all, she needs to keep her job so she can support her parents and siblings in the storm-torn south.

But when Key collects a memory that diverges from official history, only Vale sees the fallout. Key’s mentor suspiciously dismisses the finding; her powerful mother demands she stop research altogether. And Key, unusually affected by the memory, begins to lose moments, then minutes, then days.

As Vale becomes increasingly entangled in Key’s obsessive drive for answers, the women uncover a shattering discovery—and a devastating betrayal. Key and Vale can remain complicit, or they can jeopardize everything for the truth.

Either way, Key is becoming consumed by the past in more ways than one, and time is running out.

Conflict and Discrimination in Secondary Worlds

Let’s be honest: People will fight over anything.

And that’s interesting. Conflict drives stories at every level, and we as the audience want to know how the characters will or won’t resolve those conflicts. Secondary world fantasies, especially epic fantasies, often have conflicts at the personal and international scale. It’s one of the hallmarks of epic fantasy—there’s an oppressed people, and a hero arises to triumph over the oppressors, and triumph results in change not just for the hero but for their people and their country.

In times previous, authors often leaned on historical conflicts for inspiration. The War of the Roses, or the Trojan War, or any number of moments in our world where the wagon wheel hit a pebble in the road and bounced out of its rut. I could go on about how our concept of secondary world fantasy has been, until recently, very colonial and West-centric, but I’m going to hit my own pebble in the track and talk about building secondary worlds without importing real-world conflicts.

How do you write about other cultures and oppression without relying on stereotypes? This is a question I’ve gotten at a lot of Diversity 101 panels, both in person and online. And it’s a 100-level question for sure; the easiest and quickest answer is to stop thinking about other cultures as homogeneous entities. Inspect that question further, however, and problems arise. What do you mean by other cultures? What do you mean by oppression? Whose cultures and whose oppression? Whose point of view are you taking when you ask about other cultures and oppression? A writer’s point of view, for sure, but that’s still a point of view.

I’ve answered this question more in depth before; when I did, I leaned on breaking down the assumption that groups of people hold the same ideas and that individuals in those groups are interchangeable. People disagree. This holds true no matter what group you’re talking about, whether it’s a fake nation in D&D or the people in your neighborhood. Writers can’t even agree on how to write! And also, this is fantasy. We make everything up. Why should there be racism or bigotry? They don’t have to exist if we don’t want them.

But, as the first sentence says, people will fight over anything. The challenge, then, is to build that secondary world without the parts we dislike. For example, I think racism and bigotry don’t have to be default states in speculative fiction. My worlds generally run without those two, though when writing in contemporary settings where the world is ours, just with magic, it’s not possible to avoid racism and bigotry because of how our world’s history has shaped us. And if you’re thinking, “Why, I can for sure write a contemporary world without racism and bigotry!” I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you, plus millions of gallons of white paint.

What remains, then, when creating conflict in a secondary world? For me, I look at my world’s resources and technological level to give me ideas. It’s very possible, for example, to have a secondary world that never had racism or colorism; I have no interest in importing a history of chattel slavery or a caste system. The absence of racism and colorism means there’s less white supremacist scaffolding. It doesn’t mean that there’s a utopia with resource and technological equality and a classless society, however, so those are two areas where non-real-world conflict can be created.

New technology creates imbalance automatically because not all people will have access to that technology. We must always ask questions about various technologies and who benefits from them, as well as who does not. If you’re working in a world that is industrializing but does not have the full distribution network set up, you then have a resource-rich area and a resource-poor area. When I’m world building, I think less about adding and more about answering questions. If resources are distributed by train, which resources would have long enough shelf lives to be transported? What kind of production scale results in having enough product to necessitate freight rail? Who is doing the work to create so much product, and who is driving the trains and laying the tracks?

Immediately, class and labor issues appear. What follows are more questions about who is doing what and whether those people are compensated. The presence of resources like textiles (cotton, linen, wool, silk) and luxury foods (sugar, tea, coffee, chocolate) mean that the writer must think about whether they want the accompanying issues, especially when production scales up. The textile industry is especially labor intensive. Cotton, wool, and linen aren’t just harvested; they must be grown and tended to by people with specialized knowledge. If the people in your world can purchase their clothes instead of making them, then textile mills and clothing factories exist. (Ah, the textile mill, famously free of child labor, dangerous machinery, toxic chemicals, and industrial waste!) If mills and factories exist, then there need to be people to build, operate, and service those machines, as well as workers and managers or bosses.

In just thinking about what clothes people are wearing and how easy it is to get them, we’ve unlocked the potential for multiple conflicts and discriminatory practices. This is the writer’s playground, and we have not touched upon real-world issues like racism. We have just created a class of people who have enough money and time to demand premade clothing. Are these people going to be high, middle, or low class? What cultural meaning is assigned to people who can purchase clothes as opposed to making them? Is this a society where the makers are venerated, or is it a society that largely forgets whose labor has created the product? What are the clothes used for, and how do those uses fit into and create culture?

I don’t want to ignore another facet of this work. The bird’s eye view, the meta view, also plays an important role in determining what your world’s biases are. Some people might say this is the writer avoiding getting canceled, but I see it as the writer being as clear as possible about what the conflict is. The writer has to figure out what others will project onto the world. Accounting for an infinite number of interpretations is not our job as writers, but making sure that the conflicts we build aren’t easily mapped onto real-world conflict is (unless your aim is to map it onto the real world, but that is a different blog post). Is your world the fantasy version of the Sneetches, or is your world’s conflict grown organically from the people inhabiting it?

The central conflict in my upcoming book, The Memory Hunters, is about access to information. Within the area between the ocean and a mountain range called the Spine, there are specialized knowledge workers who can “dive” into the genetic record of the past to excavate memories and expertise lost during an event called the Decade of Storms and its aftermath. Those people, called memory hunters, grant huge advantages to others who have access to them. Prominent memory hunter families have, since the Decade, become extremely wealthy on the backs of their discoveries; they also sell their services to those seeking answers from the past, ranging from family disputes to design specs for vacuum-tube radios. That wealth has allowed them to build long-term housing in places unlikely to be flattened by hurricanes.

The ability to dive is not prevalent at all in the southern part of the Spine or on the coasts, and thus the people living there are at a disadvantage in a world founded on the bones of the past that also has ancestor worship as its religion. Ancestor worship developed as a grief and trauma response to all the people displaced, lost, and killed during the Decade, and the memory hunters can give glimpses of passed relatives to those who ask. The memory hunters, however, are unwilling to head to where storms routinely wipe out entire communities, and so the inequality continues to perpetuate as time goes on and more and more people are lost (and more memories are found and enshrined in museums absent their cultural contexts). With this foundational inequality, I was able to expand my world into one where classism and xenophobia are used to discriminate against others.

I find that in world building, the existence of the most mundane objects can reveal so much in terms of a world’s history and culture—while also shedding light on assumptions made by the writer. And I think this is where I have the most fun, if one can call creating conflict and discrimination in a secondary world fun. But, like I said, people fight over anything. I’d rather create my own path than set my world into highly constraining wagon ruts. Doing this is hard work and requires so much thought and consideration. But it’s also disruptive. It’s fresh and showcases how deeply you build. And it’s very, very rewarding.

Photo Credit: Rebekah Chavez Wynne, Wynne Photography

Mia Tsai is a Taiwanese American author and editor of speculative fiction. She debuted with Bitter Medicine, a xianxia-inspired contemporary fantasy. Her next novel, The Memory Hunters, is forthcoming from Erewhon Books on July 29, 2025. She lives in Atlanta with her family, pets, and orchids. Her favorite things include music of all kinds and taking long trips with nothing but the open road and a saucy rhythm section.