Kate Elliott and Suzan Palumbo have both written gender-flipped space opera re-imaginings of well-known stories: Elliott has taken on the story of Alexander the Great, while Palumbo turned her eye to The Count of Monte Cristo. I asked them to chat with me, and each other, about why they chose those narratives and what decisions they made in writing their own versions.
You’ve both written stories that switch the gender of key protagonists in well-known stories, at least for a Western audience (and although Alexander the Great was a real person, I feel like his story is pretty much “a story” at this point), and you’ve also both set those stories in space. So…
Why flip the gender of the main character (as well as some of the supporting cast)?
Suzan: The motivation for me was representation. We’ve made some wonderful strides with representation in SFF in novels and in movies and on television. That said, I had never read a space opera or watched one with a Trinidadian woman as the main character. It was important for me to depict a character like me who was capable and had goals and ideas about the world. Again, I’d never encountered that in a science fiction novel previously, so I set out to make it exist!
I also loved the Count of Monte Cristo as a kid and teenager. I identified with Edmund’s feelings of betrayal and desire for vengeance for the injustices he’d suffered. Stereotypically women aren’t portrayed as wanting revenge (of course there are exceptions!) We are often told that we should be forgiving and accept and move past betrayals. Virika, in Countess, doesn’t do this. She cannot quell her anger and can’t bring herself to forget the wrongs she’s suffered. I thought it would be interesting to highlight the refusal to let things go or pass. What does revenge mean if it is enacted by a woman coming from an anticolonial stance? It isn’t the personal revenge of a man wronged; it’s an effort to change a system as a whole and we all know, one person cannot change a system on her own. I think a woman of color was the right choice in this case to be the catalyst for that type of revolutionary spark. A WOC POV is also one I’m very familiar with :)
Was representation a big factor for you as well Kate? Was Alexander the Great a figure you read about growing up?
Kate: Yes, representation definitely was a big factor for me, especially in the sense that I began reading sff at a time when most of the characters in stories were men, the main characters were almost always men, and women were largely relegated to support roles, usually as caretakers or sexual partners. This was accompanied by a pervasive dominant narrative that boys were one thing and girls were another and entirely different, lesser thing, and so obviously in stories boys wanted adventure and tales of derring-do (and so on) while girls wanted domesticity and to be rewarded by being chosen by a man (and so on).
From my early teen years I rejected this because I knew it wasn’t true of me. And if not true of me personally, then why should I believe it was necessarily true of everyone else? What if the dominant narrative was—dare we say?—distorted or even just plain wrong? When I began to write in my mid-teens, even as brined as I was in these cultural messages, I wanted to write stories with girls and women at the center of adventures and tales of derring-do. Later that goal expanded to including traditionally understood “women’s work” and “women’s lives” as being as worthy of narrative as any traditionally male-coded story, not lesser. This then expands ever outward to the perspective that so many people’s lives have been seen as unimportant, and that narrative should and can elevate all people to narrative prominence.
I’ve long known who Alexander the Great was because he’s so well known historically, but the genesis of my specific interest in him came from a course on the Hellenistic Era that I took at university. I find him particularly intriguing because he is both the protagonist and the antagonist of his own tale. Here’s where I admit that I named one of my sons Alexander! So I guess I was fated to write this story eventually.
In concise terms, my specific interest in writing a gender-flipped Alexander is strikingly similar to Suzan’s desire to write about a woman seeking revenge.
The aspect of Alexander I most wanted to depict in my space opera is the sense that, just as no one in his time doubted Alexander’s ability to become king and lead armies, the society around Sun never doubts her capacity to lead. I did not want to tell a story in which she claws her way past gender or class (etc) obstacles to achieve great renown and status (and to be clear, I have nothing against that story; it’s a great story!) In our world today, it is still rare for women’s leadership not to be picked apart, questioned, and challenged. I wanted her personality to have developed within the same cultural assumption of competency and opportunity that Alexander received. It’s a story we rarely see, and so I wanted to tell it.
Why set your re-telling in space?
Kate: I never contemplated writing a fantasy version of Alexander’s story. Wizards? Dragons? Magic? None of that interested me in the same way as “Pigs in Spaaaace!” as the Muppets used to say. Who doesn’t want pigs in space, I ask you?
A science fictional setting offers so many rich possibilities. For one thing, rather than creating a secondary world with similar elements to our own history to justify the story, I could just keep our world and our history, and I did keep it. But I catapulted the story several thousand years into the future, after a generation ship space voyage has severed the voyaging population from Old Earth. As well, the archives of Earth placed on the generation ships (I posited) were fractured and partly destroyed. This conceit allowed me to create a setting with connections to our world and its cultures and history while having those connections be like broken pot sherds picked up piece by piece out of a desert ruin.
It allows me to ask the question: What do we really know about the past? What is our relationship to the process of journey and generations that has brought all of us, or any of us, to the point we are now? There are different degrees of connection (and separation), which are often interacting with each other. Probably because my dad taught history, I have long been fascinated with who, how, and what we were (or may have been) and how we (have) become what we are or wish to be.
It also allows me to use familiar touch-points, some of which are what you and I assume they are, while others (“not my monkey, not my circus” being understood as a reference to a monkey wrench, since monkeys are unknown) have veered off into a related reference or into what we recognize as fantasy: Knights rode dinosaurs, right? It allows the reader to learn new things but also effortlessly to be in on the joke.
Part of world building like this is just plain fun, because I can basically do what I want (with some limitations). Other elements allow me to comment on the present, which is what I believe most science fiction is about anyway.
Finally (to not write a trilogy on this topic), instead of horses and cavalry I have spaceships and fleets. The long distances Alexander’s army journeyed and its slow speed of communications are easily replicated in a setting where people are traveling from one solar system to the next across vast distances (but with special made-up faster ways to travel and or communicate being part of the plot as well because, again, why wouldn’t I want to do that? I would!).
What about you, Suzan? I thought Countess works really well translated into space.
Suzan: Kate, I read your answer and yelled, “Yes! Exactly!” I would gladly read a trilogy of you speaking on this topic! I set Countess in the future and in space because I’m interested in how what we do during our lifetimes will play out in the far future. And like you, this also allowed me to keep our history, culture and some of our political structures while presenting them fictionally. The novella is a commentary on our present times, though I wrote it just before this specific current political climate.
Part of what’s gone into how I’ve conceptualized Countess was my horror after reading a tech billionaire say that a potential Martian colony would source labour from people who would sign up to “immigrate.” Once on Mars, these “immigrants” would work to pay off their passage. This is essentially indentured labour, an issue that is an unignorable specter in my family history. I am in large part the descendant of indentured labourers who were brought to the Caribbean to work on plantations after the abolition of enslavement. This type of casual suggestion by the billionaire references a deeply exploitive practice that has had long reaching detrimental effects on me, my family and the country where I was born.
It’s interesting but terrifying to me that we have come so far with technology and have such grand ambitions to leave the earth and yet it seems like, when and if we do leave, the billionaires and politicians in charge want to bring the same harmful ways of treating people with us. Many books I read about the future do not want to look at race in the future. They assume that this concern has been solved, but in my day to day life, I don’t feel that it has been solved. So I wrote those exact issues into space because they are just as important a concern as how much fuel does one need to get to Mars, if we are actually going to go to Mars. To be honest, I think these social issues are even more important.
That said, I think we are capable of solving these problems! I’m hopeful everyday that we are going to get kinder and treat everyone with respect.
On a lighter note, the plot of The Count of Monte Cristo translated very easily to far flung planets in a distant galaxy. Planets are like islands in a way, and you can easily swap an island prison with a prison planet, as well as a treasure island with a treasure planet. It’s also just as easy to create empires in a similar manner.
Why choose that particular narrative to re-tell?
Suzan: I love a good revenge story! There is nothing more satisfying than watching someone who was unjustly treated triumph and thrive. Aside from that, The Count of Monte Cristo is an adventure. It’s got treasure, bandits, duels. My themes are quite heavy but writing this retelling allowed me to write action scenes, a prison break and a space chase. Who doesn’t love a good pew, pew, pew, space ship show down? This book was a significant departure from my short fiction which doesn’t usually showcase any action at all! It was fun! I had fun writing it!
I’m also a big fan of Star Trek: The Original Series and writing this novella allowed me to pretend I was writing something that had a similar flavour. That opening scene, if you squint and angle your head, is a homage to Kirk in his captain’s chair on the Enterprise asking his crew for status reports.
How about you Kate, why this specific narrative to retell? Is there another historical figure you’d like to tackle in the future?
Kate: I love the bit about the opening scene in the captain’s chair!
I want to circle back briefly to your discussion of history, the Caribbean, indentured servitude, and the tech billionaire proposing what is essentially indentured servitude for his glorious Mars colony. Of course such a system serves people like him, who control the money and power, just as it always has historically. Whenever I see writers or readers say they don’t want “politics” in their fiction, I think of how this proposed Mars colony narrative is political at root, even if those championing it, or people who might write this story, don’t define it as such as long as there isn’t a politician character or an election featured. Such a narrow definition of “politics” when politics permeates the grandest and the most intimate aspects of our lives and our narratives.
The past is what builds our present, and not just the past but the narrative we tell about the past, and which aspects of the past “we” (so many different “we”s exist) emphasize or even simply consider worth taking into account. Stories like Countess or Unconquerable Sun—and so many others—are constantly grappling with that intersection of past, present, and how we can hope to think about the future, or about any narrative that pushes back against dominant ideas of “how things were, are, and will (or must) be.” We could talk about this for hours!
In my earlier answer I think I mostly covered why I wrote the Alexander story specifically. I wanted to add that I’ve always been interested in empire as the subject of story and history (and history as story). Many of my novels are based around a setting or within a character journey that involves empire at some level. It’s almost as if I’m poking at empire with a stick from different angles and with varying intensities. What is empire? Why is it? Who is involved? What does it mean for people in and around its influence? How do imperial forces play out? I grew up and still live inside the USA, an empire by every measure, so I use fiction to wrestle with what that means to me. I’d call “wrestling with empire” one of the thematic groundworks of my writing, with different stories and characters (and vastly different worlds) built atop such foundational questions.
As for tackling other historical figures in the future, I did write an alt-version of Napoleon (as one does) in the Spiritwalker Trilogy (Cold Magic, et al), but he’s a secondary character (not that HE thinks he is). For years I have mulled over writing a gender-flipped version of Alexander von Humboldt, the naturalist, who is a fascinating individual (also named Alexander; interesting!). As well, since childhood I have wanted to write a gender-flipped version of Prometheus, my favorite Greek myth, but I haven’t yet come up with a character and plot that works to fit the aesthetic floating around in the back of my mind. Oh well. It’ll either happen, or it won’t.
Were there particular things that you absolutely had to keep from the original (other than the obvious narrative beats), perhaps for your own enjoyment? Or, conversely, aspects that you knew you had to remove?
Kate: In July 2021 I wrote three essays about adapting the Alexander story to science fiction, in which I go into depth about the choices I made. They’re available at Reactor Magazine: Essay 1; Essay 2; Essay 3.
Briefly, I kept the main outline of the historical events and political entities intact as much as I was able. I retain the major players (Alexander, his father and mother Philip and Olympias, and his best friend/probably lover Hephaestion, all of whom are gender flipped). A number of other historical figures have direct analogs; in some cases I combined people and their roles to simplify an already crowded cast.
Both the history and the people involved seemed, to me, to be crucial for an Alexander story to work. He lived within a culture and milieu that made him who and what he was, and thus I needed to replicate the idea that Sun is who she is because of the world and people around her, without making the setting and culture exactly the same. Switching the setting to space means exciting space battles (more pew, pew, pew, as per Suzan!). It also means I don’t have to adhere to the patriarchal culture of ancient Greece but can develop other cultural settings with a mix of hierarchies, gender politics, and political, cultural, and religious structures. Creating new settings is half the fun!
Something I don’t discuss in the essays is the challenge and opportunity of creating those other cultural settings in a way that makes each distinguishable from the others while not being direct copies of any known historical Earth society.
Alexander led the Macedonian army to conquer the Persian Empire (the great empire of its time) and then he just kept going; once he left Macedonia, he never returned. The period following his expedition is generally referred to as the Hellenistic Age, because Alexander’s far-flung conquests created a Greek cultural and linguistic (and Macedonian military and leadership) diaspora from Greece to Egypt to the borders of India that hung on for almost 300 years (succeeded by the Roman conquests). It’s not that cultures weren’t in contact before that; they were! But there’s more churn, over a much wider area, under the umbrella of this new linguistic and cultural ruling class lingua franca. Much of that churn is coercive and violent (his surviving generals fought for decades over his empire after his death), but this period is also a time of flourishing trade, art, and intellectual and scientific discoveries. An era of expanding interaction is the template for the wide ranging systems, and the ways they fit together and splinter apart, of the Sun books. It also means I send my characters across a vast swathe of inhabited space where they come into contact with places and people who seem familiar and others who seem very strange, indeed.
I’m excited to read Suzan’s answer, and I confess I hope there’ll be a mention of the importance of food.
Suzan: It’s so interesting how much history one needs to know to write about the future, isn’t it? I loved this answer Kate and thank you for the links!
I took a lot of risks in choosing to write a story that was a retelling/inspired by the beloved Count of Monte Cristo. The biggest, and the one people point out the most often, is the extreme difference in length between Dumas’ work, which is a one thousand page classic and mine, a hundred and sixty page novella.
I was very aware when writing Countess of this crucial difference. A novella simply cannot cover the same amount of territory that a thousand page master work can. That said, I didn’t set out to cover the exact same territory. I did not simply want to swap in a woman of Trinidadian descent as the main character. Besides, if you want that authentic Monte Cristo feel, one can read Dumas! He’s a classic and my inspiration for a reason!
As a writer, I believe I’m here to add my own flavour to things and I believe that who a character is, and the time period they live in, should affect the trajectory and beats of the story, essentially altering the plot to reflect their circumstances and concerns in the world. Edmund Dantes’ tale of vengeance was deeply affecting for me. I was enthralled by his drive for revenge but when I came to write my novella, I knew that Virika’s escape and his escape would lead to divergent outcomes because their ways of conceptualizing the world change in different ways. As a result, I kept many of the early beats of The Count of Monte Cristo and did not use the predetermined map of Edmund’s personal mission to destroy those who had hurt him once he became the Count. Virika’s concerns are centered around undermining colonial powers and their corrupt institutions, while fomenting broad scale revolution rather than insinuating herself into those institutions to bankrupt or destroy the people who hurt her family.
So the tl:dr My novella takes many of its plot beats from the beginning of Dumas work because of length, but also because Virika was never on the path of intricate personal vengeance that takes up the larger portion of The Count of Monte Cristo. I wanted to decenter her in ways that highlighted collective action rather than individual agency with respect to equity and justice at the end.
Now to food for Kate! Focusing on making the book uniquely Virika’s story allowed me to write about Trinidadian culture. All of the food in Countess is the food my mother made for me as a child or food I can cook for myself. For many years my rotis were more square than round and my mother found that hilarious. (THEY STILL TASTED GOOD. WHO CARES ABOUT SHAPE?) I love Trinidadian food and I wanted to share its deliciousness with the SFFH world. All of the descriptions in the book are my own mouth watering reactions! So, everyone go out to your local Trinidadian roti shop and get yourself some tasty curry chicken! In a similar vein, focusing on Trinidadian culture allowed me to describe what it was personally like to grow up in a Caribbean diaspora community and highlight the bonds people have in those communities as well as the challenges they face in assimilating if that’s their goal. It allowed me to explore how one goes from being taught to be ashamed of their heritage, to realizing how lucky they are to have come from such a resilient, creative, brave part of the world.
It was an absolute joy to just go off on my food, language, and culture in the book and I have not one regret about doing so! :)
What did you learn, or realise, about the original story that surprised you as you wrote your own version?
Suzan: This may be a controversial take but, while I still adore The Count of Monte Cristo, I found I was less interested in writing about a marginalized person who infiltrates the upper echelons of society and institutions by assimilating to the ways of the dominant group in order to achieve power, than I was about grass roots collectives who continually work for change.
The brilliant marginalized hero is a common archetype we see throughout storytelling and it is certainly by no means unique to Dumas’ book. It’s a compelling and dynamic way to create a character that the audience can root for. Virika does begin her journey as that exact archetype, I think.
That said, it isn’t where we end up and that’s because I feel more driven to write characters who are not interested in participating in oppressive systems with the hopes of someday helping others through their accumulated power. I do believe in the saying that absolute power corrupts absolutely and because of that I’m much more drawn to people and characters who are able to call out inequality directly and try their best in this very compromised world to be loud and visible in their opposition.
I completely support Edmund Dantes dragging everyone involved in the destruction of his life, but I didn’t feel that I was capable of writing that kind of story, because I just wanted to get rid of the banks and the corrupt legal system as a whole!
Whew! What did you learn about Alexander the Great that surprised you, Kate? What’s the hot goss on him? I need to know!!!
Kate: As a child I more or less learned the standard stereotype that the ancient classical world was a land of men doing man things like ruling, fighting, trading, crafting, etc etc, while women were rather more passive mothers, wives, daughters, courtesans, or slaves, with a few odd exceptions.
I knew that Alexander’s father, Philip, had multiple wives, as kings in that era did. Most were political marriages made to cement an alliance, but a political marriage would also produce children. I knew Alexander had a half brother who was disabled and thus not seen as an acceptable heir. He also had a full sister named Cleopatra (long before the famous Cleopatra), known for having been a marriage prize once Alexander became king, as well as after his death.
What I didn’t know before I started doing more concentrated reading is that Alexander had an older half sister from Philip’s first marriage, a political alliance with an Illyrian king (or possibly a marriage that took place after he defeated an Illyrian king). Let me quote from Elizabeth Carney’s excellent book Women and Monarchy in Macedonia [2000]:
Nothing more is said about Audata by any ancient source directly, but a number of sources report that her daughter, Cynnane, fought in battle and trained her daughter Adea Eurydice to fight in battle.
It seems that Illyrian princesses were trained to fight on the battlefield and lead troops, in contrast to Macedonian women, who have no such martial tradition. Carney goes on to say:
Audata seems not only to have maintained an Illyrian identity in a Macedonian context but also to have passed that somewhat alien identity on to her daughter and granddaughter.
Which brings me around to Suzan’s discussion of diaspora community and how people hold on to where they came from in the face of cultural norms that are trying to erase them.
I think a lot about Audata’s decision to hang on to her identity in a foreign land, and also about Cynnane and Adea Eurydice, who held on to what she taught them (until their deaths, one in battle, one murdered with her husband). These two are better attested than Audata, yet they were for a long time (and perhaps still) ignored, dismissed, and even written out of later histories by historians who didn’t think women mattered even when they were literally doing the things those historians thought mattered.
How do people hold on to where they came from? In terms of writing my Sun books, I had to decide what elements of ancient Earth would still resonate in the “present” of the story (which takes place several thousand years after leaving Earth), and what connections would be lost. As well, like Suzan, I had to think through the source story, both in terms of how it has been seen over time and how I want to respond to it, to shape it through the factors that matter most to the “me” who is writing now.
The Romans seem to have been fascinated by Alexander, a conqueror who never lost a battle he personally commanded and who forged a vast empire out of his conquests (although not ultimately a successful one; that was left to the generals who survived him). More recent historians have swung (to give some examples) between presenting Alexander as a visionary who “dreamed of” a unified world or seeing him as a bloodthirsty and savage thug. Did he show maturity beyond his years? Was he a reckless narcissist who wasted the army his father had built on dreams of glory?
Who historical people become to those in the “present” (whenever that present may be) changes depending on where and who and when. But because I happen to be skeptical of a program of world conquest driven by one person’s sense of destiny, an interesting tension arises in the ongoing Sun story between the events I need to write from the point of view of those who are “living” them versus my own opinions about what makes a better world.
Most of all I wanted Sun, and the other characters, to be products of their time and place and background, acting according to how they see the world, for good or for ill. At the same time, even though I tend to wish to be “invisible” inside the narrative, I literally cannot extricate myself from the story I am writing and thus I will make narrative decisions (as Suzan so incisively does with Countess) that reflect my background and experiences. Surely that’s the whole point of me (or Suzan) writing a story: that our art emerges out of the specific people we are.
Suzan Palumbo is a Trinidadian-Canadian, dark speculative fiction writer and editor. Her work has been nominated for the Nebula, Aurora, World Fantasy and Locus awards. She also cofounded the Ignyte Awards with L.D. Lewis and coedited the special Caribbean issue of Strange Horizons Magazine. In 2025 she won a Locus Award for her work with the Ignytes. Her debut dark fantasy/horror short story collection Skin Thief: Stories is out now from Neon Hemlock. Her novella Countess, a Nebula Award finalist, was published by ECW Press on September 10th 2024. Her writing has been published in Room Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, Fantasy, The Deadlands, The Dark Magazine, PseudoPod, Fireside Fiction Quarterly, PodCastle, Anathema: Spec Fic from the Margins and other venues. She is officially represented by Michael Curry of the Donald Maass Literary Agency and can be found on Instagram @gothicsyntax. When she isn’t writing, she is often sketching, listening to new wave or wandering her local misty forests.
Kate Elliott has been publishing science fiction and fantasy novels and stories for over 30 years with a particular focus in immersive world building and epic stories of adventure & transformative cultural change. Her work has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Norton, and Locus Awards.
If you’re wondering “Where should I start with your novels,” here’s an answer http://www.imakeupworlds.com/index.php/2015/02/where-should-i-start-with-your-novels/ (boy band style). You can most easily find her online at Bluesky: kateelliottsff.bsky.social
She lives in Hawaii, where she competes in outrigger canoe paddling and spoils her schnauzer.