This month, Rebecca Anne Nguyen is releasing her novel, The 23rd Hero, a sci-fi adventure that pulls together themes of climate change, time travel, memory and love. We got the chance to sit down with her and ask about the new book, some of her favorite reads and writing as a form of activism.

What inspired you to write The 23rd Hero?

My debut novel is a love story inspired by my divorce. In 2019, I was separated from my then-husband, raising our two young sons by myself in a doublewide trailer in an unincorporated town in South Carolina. Getting divorced was hard enough, but becoming a single parent when my youngest was still in diapers was more pressure than I thought I could take.

I needed an escape from reality, some sort of relief from my situation. I had always been a nonfiction writer, but writing about my life at that point was too painful. I started creating a world that looked nothing like my own, filled with characters who were nothing like me or my once husband. In the beginning, I didn’t even know I was writing a novel. I just knew I felt some reprieve whenever I sank into the world of my imagination. And I kept sinking, and escaping, and over the course of five years, a novel took shape.

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Your novel begins in a near-future dystopia where time travel is used to reverse the effects of climate change on a rapidly dying planet. What role do you feel fiction plays in activism and driving awareness?

I think fiction can be one of the most powerful ways to effect change because good fiction moves us deeply on an emotional level, and that’s where meaningful change stems from. We’re more likely to take action when we feel moved to do so rather than obligated or pressured.

I think of the The 23rd Hero as a love letter to Mother Nature and an invitation for readers to reaffirm or rediscover their own connection to the natural world. The theme of environmental stewardship is less about what we ‘should’ do to save the planet and more about rediscovering our connection to the Earth so that we don’t have to be mandated to protect it — we naturally want to.

Time travel can present a lot of tricky twists and turns in storytelling. What were some of the challenges you faced with The 23rd Hero?

While working on early drafts of the novel, I was so concerned about genre. Was I writing science fiction, time travel romance, historical fiction, or something else? I felt this pressure to decide because I had read these completely unhelpful ‘rules’ about time travel and genre — namely, that science fiction writers leverage technology to make time travel possible, while romance writers leverage magic. I thought I had a big problem because in the world of my story, time travel is possible because of technology and magic, which essentially left me genre-less. I had to get comfortable with breaking the rules and realize that there are no hard-and-fast rules in fiction.

I was ultimately less interested in the nuts-and-bolts mechanics of time travel than in what time travel could be used to accomplish. In the story, Heroes are selected to travel back in time to reverse the course of history to stop climate change in the future. They disrupt harmful environmental practices, prevent inventions from being invented, and introduce more sustainable methods earlier in time. (One Hero convinces Henry Ford to invent an electric Model-T. Another dismantles the cattle ranching industry so the Amazon rainforest can grow back.)

But I found I had to limit the explanations about time travel so they didn’t overshadow the main story, which is about a woman learning to love herself, embrace her weaknesses as strengths, and become the hero the world needs. My hope is that readers will suspend their disbelief and wonder less about how time travel is possible and more about why Sloane, our hero, has been having recurring dreams about the same man for the past ten years and what that man has to do with her secret longing to become the first female time traveler.

Who are some of the authors who inspire you?

Andrew Sean Greer is my favorite novelist. I love his laugh-out-loud humor and representation of romantic love as something tender and sacred. Greer is able to portray what’s painful about love while retaining what’s precious about it, and I find that balance more satisfying and more realistic than portraying love as either strictly awful or perfectly wonderful.

I also adore the short story writer Lucia Berlin for her humor, unapologetically flawed humanity, and use of settings we don’t see enough of in contemporary American fiction (mid-century Santiago,  the American West, the bottom of the ocean). Ted Chiang is a writer whose ingenuity and radical world-building blow my mind; I never knew I loved science fiction until I read Stories of Your Life and Others. I am also endlessly inspired and in awe of Jennifer Egan, especially her novel The Candy House. She tells stories in ways I didn’t think stories could be told, breaking all the rules, and it’s breathtaking.

Who do you think is the ideal reader for your book?

My ideal reader loves adventure, escape, and feeling totally transported into another world when they read. Deep down, they’re a hopeless romantic, but the typical romance novel doesn’t always satisfy them psychologically or emotionally — they need something deeper, something epic, a love story for the ages. They enjoy fast-moving plots but still want to connect deeply with the characters, and they are open to cross-genre novels that don’t fit neatly into any category. They like secret identities, plot twists, sexual tension, cool technology, strong female protagonists, high stakes, and happy endings.

Tell us about your main character. What drives her? What scares her? And how did she first show up in your mind?

The “hero” in The 23rd Hero is Sloane Burrows, a young woman with a superpower memory who grew up being shamed for her gift. In the beginning of the story, Sloane’s daily life is consumed with suppression. She suppresses her memory so no one will think she’s a freak, and she suppresses her burning desire to be a Hero—an honor historically given to men only.

What scares Sloane most is her father’s disapproval, especially because he’s the only parent she’s ever known and he’s always treated her with disdain. She stuffs her dream of being a Hero and hides her memory as best she can. But every night, in her dreams, she gets a chance to be her true self. For the past ten years, Sloane has been dreaming the same dream every night. In the dream, a beautiful man makes her feel loved and accepted, not despite her memory but because of it. But when the man in the dream suddenly walks into her life, her world is turned upside down.

My first inkling of Sloane was actually a vision of her mother, Thida. She came into my mind out of nowhere, her face sharper and clearer than any memory: I saw her large, dark eyes, the firm set of her mouth, the stark intensity of her gaze, as if we’d run into each other on the street and she had terrible news for me. She was strikingly beautiful, and while I’d never seen her before in real life, I could easily picture her in Siem Reap, the Cambodian city I’d lived in for two months in 2014.

It’s fitting that Sloane’s mother came to me before Sloane did. Even though Thida died giving birth to Sloane, the theme of motherhood is strong throughout the story. Sloane rediscovers her connection with Mother Earth. She contemplates becoming a mother herself. When her mission in the past seems impossible, it’s the memory of her mother that gives her the courage to keep going.

What sort of research did you have to do to send your characters to sixteenth-century France?

I am the world’s laziest researcher. A lot of writers consider research the most enjoyable part of the writing process and I am not one of those writers.

Early on in the writing process, I decided that because the book wasn’t strictly historical fiction, plausibility mattered more to me than perfect factual accuracy. I read history texts on sixteenth-century France so I had an understanding of the world Sloane would inhabit when she traveled back in time, but I primarily let the story and characters take the lead as I was drafting.

Later in the revision process, I worked with a wonderful fact checker, Alice Chen, who helped me understand where I had strayed from the truth. In many cases, I corrected mistakes to be more historically accurate, but sometimes I purposefully played with the timing of events to better serve the story. I hope readers will feel like they’ve been transported five centuries into the past along with Sloane, but I also hope no one makes the mistake of using The 23rd Hero as historical reference material!

What are you working on next?

The 23rd Hero is complex. It combines different genres, different time periods, even different versions of the same person at different points in time. I wanted my next novel to be simpler, and I wanted to lean into those parts of Hero that seemed to resonate most with my beta readers — the love story between Sloane and Bastian, and the humor that binds them together across the centuries. Naturally, my next novel is a romantic comedy! It’s actually a prequel to Hero that takes place in present day-Door County, Wisconsin, where Bastian’s grandparents first met and fell in love. It has Pride and Prejudice vibes, and while it’s more of a literary novel, it includes some of my favorite tropes from the romance genre: enemies to lovers, fake dating, forced proximity, and a slow burn romance. And, most importantly, a happy ending.

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