Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner, popular authors in the Young Adult, Science-Fiction world, work together very closely. It’s just that when they do, they’re usually 9, 844 miles apart.
Spooner resides in Ashville, North Carolina. Kaufman lives with her husband and rescue dog in Melbourne, Australia. While they dash through adventures set in the near future, the two writers rely on our modern technology — Skype, Google Hangouts, instant-messaging, texts and email.
They teamed to create the award-winning “Starbound” trilogy. On Tuesday, Jan. 9, their latest work, “Unearthed,” will be unveiled. It’s already been optioned and is being adapted into a major film.
Kaufman and Spooner met online 12 years ago, participating in a fan-fiction, role-playing game. Spooner said, “Our styles clicked and we became friends almost overnight. We’ve been writing together ever since.”
They learned that they have similar tastes, not only in fiction, but in other areas of life. Spooner said, “We also both love good TV, going for long brainstorming walks, tea, and anything nerdy — science, linguistics, philosophy — and especially anything to do with outer space.”
Kaufman and Spooner get together a couple of times per year, most often during book tours. But they’re constantly emailing and texting. Spooner said, “The emails are a crazy mishmash of work-related and chatting and keeping each other updated on our lives.”
They’re long-distance best friends. “Actually, I would say we’re closer to sisters,” Kaufman said, reached by phone in Melbourne.
They’re incredibly inventive, that’s for sure. Packed with action, adventure and romance, “Unearthed” tells a compelling story. With Earth already decimated by environmental disaster, attention has turned to Gaia, the planet of an extinct alien race. Our teen heroes, Mia and Jules, explore a danger-filled ancient temple. They have their own agendas, but the survival of their home world may hinge on their deeds.
For a decade, Kaufman and Spooner wrote together purely for their own amusement. But when “These Broken Stars,” first in the “Starbound” series, was published in 2013, the women were established as a blockbuster duo.
From the beginning, their collaborative process clicked. Spooner, who also wrote the “Skylark” trilogy, said, “It never gets boring. If one of us starts to flag, the other’s got ideas. And there’s nothing like someone else’s passion for your writing to keep you motivated. We trade chapters back and forth like presents for each other, and it’s always exciting to read what the other has done.”
In “Unearthed, Spooner and Kaufman were intrigued by the notion of combining archaeology and science-fiction. The spark for “Unearthed” came during a book tour, on a rare afternoon off, when the pair was watching an “Indiana Jones” movie marathon in their hotel room.
Kaufman, who also co-authored “The Illuminae Files,” said, “We were literally just saying to each, ‘Gosh, why aren’t there more Young Adult books like this that are just fantastic, romping adventures, with the puzzles and the banter and the close scrapes?'”
Distinctive, relatable characters help make this ride entertaining. Kaufman said, “We really like to explore characters from different worlds. And occasionally, that is literally characters from different worlds, if we’re really getting into space opera territory. But also just characters from different backgrounds. Today more than ever, we can use a bit of practice at understanding people who see the world differently than the way we do.”
Jules is a privileged, sheltered academic from Oxford with little field experience. Mia is a high school dropout, a street smart scavenger from the Midwest. They have snuck onto Gaia for very different reasons.
Spooner said, “They’re ideologically opposite one another — they each think the other’s lifestyle is wrong in some way — and yet they come to respect, admire, and even love each other over the course of the book. It’s always fun to show people realizing they don’t have all the answers.”
For all the excitement and fun, readers will also find some thought-provoking themes in “Unearthed.”
“You never write a book to teach a lesson,” Kaufman said, “because, as soon as you do, you’re preaching and your readers will, quite rightly, disappear. But we hope that after finishing one of our books, the reader will pause and consider a lot of things, whether it’s that somebody they might have put a label on might have been more complex than they thought. … Or whether it’s some of the environmental concerns.”
Kaufman and Spooner are working on the second book of the duology, which will complete the “Unearthed” saga. They’re at home in YA.
Kaufman said, “We feel there is no need to write down to YA readers or to make anything simple for them. They’re incredibly engaged and demanding readers.
“Young Adult literature is the literature of figuring out who you’ve been and who you’re going to be next. That’s something that we do in high school, but it’s also something that humans do their whole lives, where we need to figure out who we are and then remake ourselves. I think that’s one of the reasons YA readership spans from teen all the up to adults.”
And science-fiction is the genre that Kaufman and Spooner find most satisfying. Kaufman said, “There’s a difference in humans when we’re looking up and outward into the universe, versus when we’re looking down at the ground and keeping ourselves limited. Science-fiction has a tradition of asking the really big questions, but allowing us to step away from our own lives, while we consider them.”
Spooner and Kaufman love interacting with readers, particularly at book signings, such as the one they’re doing at Kepler’s in Menlo Park on Wednesday, Jan. 10.
Spooner said, “I write because of the connection you make with people through words — you imagine a world, and if you do it right, you can recreate that world brick by brick in the mind of someone you’ve never met. It’s a beautiful thing, and something that never, ever gets old.”
Email Paul Freeman at paul@popcultureclassics.com.
Books
What: Authors Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner
Where: Kepler’s Books, 1010 El Camino Real, Menlo Park
When: 7 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2018
Admission: Free; RSVP at www.keplers.org
Author websites: www.amiekaufman.com, www.meaganspooner.com
