The 10th Anniversary
The story behind the 10th Anniversary Edition of The Bone Season, originally written by Samantha Shannon for Waterstones in April 2023.
THE WHY
❀
I started the first draft of The Bone Season in 2011, between the ages of nineteen and twenty. I had a clear, ambitious vision – seven books that blended the scope of epic fantasy with the dystopian genre. It would be a grand reimagining of the Greek myth of Prometheus and Pandora, centred on an Irish clairvoyant and a gentle, mysterious giant – two characters who were, and remain, my favourite of all my creations.
Paige Mahoney had walked into my head that summer. I was about to enter my second year of studying English Language and Literature at St Anne’s College, part of the University of Oxford. Like many writers, I was an introvert with a natural love of learning, well-suited to libraries and days of solitude. Yet during my time at Oxford, I often felt as if I was drifting over the surface of the experience, watching myself from outside and above – somewhat like Paige, detached from her body. I now believe this was a warning sign of burnout.
When I had firmed up the concept for The Bone Season, I knew Oxford was the only possible setting for the first instalment – the City of Dreaming Spires, magnificent yet terrible. I prefer my books to speak for themselves as much as possible, but for a fusion of fantasy and dystopia that covered the particular themes I wanted to explore, an old and influential city with an intricate web of traditions and ranks – even an internal jargon – was the right stage for the opening act. Steeped in centuries of wealth, it is a crucible of political and social power, and if there is magic in it, it is not shared equally.
As I was writing The Bone Season, it began to reflect my complicated relationship with the city. During my first year, I had taken my preliminary exams and been formally assigned the rank of commoner. Perhaps that was the seed of the tests, and the colour system that echoed the Oxonian tradition of wearing carnations to exams: white for your first, red for the last, and pink for those in the middle. I transfigured the colleges into residences for ancient giants; I reduced the Bodleian Library to a shadow of its former self; I built the Rookery on Broad Street and let ghosts loose on Port Meadow. I would chip away at my essays about John Donne and Aphra Behn during the day, while The Bone Season devoured my evenings. Ironically, it became my anchor.
I’ve told the story of my publication journey many times, so the version I will give here is concise. In my view, there are three vital keys to getting a book published: raw potential, timing and luck, the latter of which often depends heavily on privilege and opportunities. All three keys must be present to open the door, and I was immensely fortunate that all three were on my side in 2012, when I struck my first book deal with Bloomsbury Publishing. I had wished on stars to be an author since I was twelve, and to have my potential recognised by an editor as brilliant and renowned as Alexandra Pringle – a powerhouse of the publishing industry – was beyond my wildest dreams. I remember the dizzying magic of meeting the team in the London office for the first time, realising they loved the characters and world as much as I did.
What followed was one of the most intense, surreal and challenging periods of my life. I suddenly found myself juggling my degree with editorial deadlines and fine-tuning my work with the team at Bloomsbury – an alarming prospect to a shy and awkward introvert. I swiftly developed severe anxiety. I couldn’t believe my childhood dream had come true, to the point that I began to believe that something terrible had to come next, to balance the scales. Within this pressure cooker, my mental health went into a sharp decline, and I found myself unable to give the editorial process the necessary care and attention as I floundered in my own panic.
Out of all this emerged The Bone Season, published in the summer of 2013, when I was twenty-one. It was an instant New York Times bestseller, thanks in part to an unusual degree of media interest in my age. In hindsight, I realise just how fortunate I was to have been afforded an experience that very few debuts receive nowadays. Such a flying start is rare in today’s publishing landscape, where first-time authors are often expected to be immediate bestsellers, but are not always given the necessary support.
Over the next ten years, the series would go on to have many loyal readers. But almost immediately after The Bone Season was published, as the dark haze of anxiety began to lift, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the first instalment could have been so much stronger if I’d only been in a better place when I edited it, and if I’d only had the skill to execute my vision with more clarity. This sinking feeling was confirmed when I finished its sequel, The Mime Order – a book written after I graduated, when I had both the time and mental resilience to give it my undivided attention. To this day, The Mime Order is second only to The Mask Falling as my favourite in the series, and the revision I have now done on it – while significant – was mostly for consistency, to bring it in line with the new version of The Bone Season.
I’m writing this essay in April 2023. Now thirty-one, I am best known for my Roots of Chaos cycle, which began with The Priory of the Orange Tree, my first novel outside the Bone Season series – but for ten years, I’ve been unable to stop thinking about the lost potential of my debut. I wanted to introduce more readers to Paige Mahoney, but I was painfully aware that the first instalment was flawed and unwieldly in places. I wanted to be as proud of my debut as I was, and still am, of the other books in the series.
If The Bone Season had been a standalone, or if I had become emotionally distanced from it, I might have let it be. Part of being a published author is accepting that some of your books will be better than others, and trusting that you’ll improve. Each book serves as a time capsule, capturing the person you were at that point in your life. Indeed, part of the joy of following any creator is witnessing their growth and change over many years – but I found myself (once again) in an unusual situation. My debut was the representative of a long series I was still working on, and was also its weakest link.
I love this series in a way I can’t fully express. I believe in it as passionately now as I did in 2011, when the idea flared into my head and possessed me. Paige and Arcturus have been my steadfast companions since I was in my teens, and their love story has kept the same tight hold on my imagination since the beginning. Arcturus has now been with me for sixteen years. I’ve lived longer with him than without him.
As I started to give serious thought to returning to The Bone Season, I had several reservations. First, I didn’t have a clue if I would even be allowed to do the sort of revision I wanted. I couldn’t think of any examples of an author performing such a drastic edit on a book that had already been published. That aside, many readers loved The Bone Season exactly as it was. They had seen a compelling story in it, as had my team at Bloomsbury; who was I to question their judgement? Surely The Bone Season no longer belonged only to me, but to everyone who had championed it. How could I take it back?
But I was still haunted by the story The Bone Season could have been. There was so much untapped potential in its pages, so much rich ground for conflict and tension. Two prisoners from different worlds, each with good reason to mistrust the other, circling around the terrifying realisation that they might be on the same side. A young woman in the grip of a cruel and charismatic criminal, whose unexpected severance from him becomes a blessing in disguise. There were so many threads I could have spun out, so many links I could have forged – but in the pressure cooker of my debut year, I had knotted or tangled some of those threads, or dropped them altogether.
With ten years’ more experience, I was confident I now knew the Republic of Scion back to front and inside out. I also trusted my own ability to realise the vision I had first had at nineteen.
So when Bloomsbury said they wanted to publish a 10th Anniversary Edition, I put my case forward. I wanted to do a comprehensive revision.
I still had some misgivings. By doing this, I was publicly admitting I could have done better the first time. As creators, we’re used to our art being critiqued by other people – it’s part of the job – but generally, we ourselves do stand by our work. But from the beginning, my mantra with this series was that I would not be afraid to take risks; I didn’t see why that shouldn’t apply to the editorial side. With full support from Bloomsbury – as ever – I set out to give it another shot.
THE HOW
❀
Since only I knew exactly what I wanted for the Anniversary Edition of The Bone Season, I acted as my own editor, trusting my instincts. If I felt that I should tweak a sentence or cut a paragraph for whatever reason, I did it. Sometimes I just didn’t like the way a sentence flowed. Many of the small changes are stylistic, while the broader ones deal primarily with character and setting.
In 2011, my style leaned towards the choppy and abrupt. While that works for a character like Paige to some degree, my writing style had changed in the wake of The Priory of the Orange Tree, becoming more fluid and lyrical, which affected the way I wrote Paige in her fourth adventure, The Mask Falling (2021). I’ve always loved the fact that Paige and I have grown up together, her voice gradually maturing with mine, but I’ve long since overtaken her in age. That meant the stylistic chasm between The Bone Season and The Mask Falling didn’t make a great deal of sense within the established universe of the series. Perhaps inevitably, the Paige who has emerged from this revision is somewhat different to her predecessor, filtered through my older self – a little more patient and cunning, her anger a little more jaded. One of my key aims was to chisel out a leaner arc for her, where her imprisonment in Oxford ironically allows her to grow outside of Jaxon’s shadow.
Clarifying the worldbuilding and magic system was an important task. The Bone Season is the first step inside a layered world that is both like and unlike ours. In the opening chapters, I introduce the reader to what Paige already knows of Scion, then shatter that knowledge with the first appearance of the Rephs. The first chapter of the original was occasionally dense and bewildering, bombarding the reader with too much information in too little time. Writing the second, third and fourth books in the series allowed me to develop Scion in more depth, giving me better judgement on what needed to be in those early chapters and what could wait until later. After all, back in 2011, I was still figuring out the world myself.
Working on The Priory of the Orange Tree, too, refined my ability to weave the fine details of a secondary world into a narrative, so I could space them out in a way that is – hopefully – easier for a reader to digest. Often, refining the worldbuilding was as simple as adjusting a conversation to give it a more logical and informative flow.
I also wanted to re-examine the backstory, including the Dublin Incursion – how it played out, who was behind it, and the profound impact it had on Paige. I added more detail to her experience at her school in London, which I renamed and grounded in a specific location. While working on the edit, I passed the Kimpton Fitzroy on Russell Square and transformed it into Ancroft.
Some scenes had a curious lack of urgency, logic or purpose. For example, after Paige kills the Underguard in the original, she has no concrete escape plan, and Jaxon reacts lackadaisically to the situation. In the revision, I interrogated each scene, searching for holes and weaknesses. I cut or rewrote several of them altogether, finding they damaged the impact of later events, or took up unnecessary space.
Another area to address was the timeline. When I was going over the original text, I couldn’t keep track of the days or weeks. While the vagueness arguably lent itself to the concept of Oxford as a liminal space – a purgatory where time has no meaning – I suspected the book would feel stronger if we were conscious of the ticking clock, since Paige only has a few months before the Bicentenary. To that end, I elected to divide the book by season (in keeping with its title) and chipped in with dates every now and again. One delightful outcome of this was being able to keep Liss in the story for longer. In the original, Paige has barely met Liss before Kath destroys her cards, leaving her in spirit shock for too long – something I hadn’t realised at the time. In the revision, I decided to move that scene to a later point in the story. I filled the gap with a few extra scenes for Liss, like the foraging and the scene by the Sleepwash.
Oxford itself required some fine-tuning. Setting is important in the series; each book has its stage, a city that becomes a character. Looking back on the original, I felt there wasn’t enough solid information about how many people were in Oxford, how it worked as a line of defence against the Emim, or what it looked like. I introduced the lamplit district and gave the forest clear boundaries, using it to artificially shrink the city to a size that would be manageable for the Rephs. The forest in the original is unnamed, but to establish a stronger sense of place, I named it Gallows Wood – the approximate English translation of Gálgviðr, a forest associated with Ragnarök – in keeping with the Rephs’ association with human mythology.
As well as firming up the boundaries of the city, I needed to pay greater attention to its inhabitants. In the original, there is a dearth of prisoners in their thirties or forties, despite some of them having been there for over a decade. I created Guy and developed the day and night porters at Magdalen, naming them Fazal and Gail.
During this process, I decided to contact Magdalen College and request permission to look inside the real-life Founders Tower. As it houses the Senior Common Room, this part of the college is generally closed to the public, and I had never worked up the courage to ask while I was still at Oxford. I am grateful to the Home Bursar, Albert Ray, who kindly granted me access in February 2023. It was delightful to be able to walk into a place I had only been able to imagine for a decade. I rushed straight home and changed the sleeping arrangements, finding it worked even better for Paige to have her own room, while Warden broods in his grand bedchamber.
I came across a few other issues during my read-through, including some gratuitous uses of words like whore and bitch, which Paige uses to describe or insult other women. At the time of writing The Bone Season, I had internalised the idea that fantasy had to involve some degree of misogyny, even though there is no logical reason for Scion – an empire created by a female Reph – to be sexist. These words do not appear in the Anniversary Edition.
If I were to rewrite The Bone Season from scratch, I would probably make even more changes – for example, I might have Paige connect with another prisoner from the syndicate during her time in Oxford. I would have liked to extend Ivy’s role, foreshadowing her importance in the subsequent books. This wasn’t ultimately feasible, as I needed to complete the revision in time for publication in August 2023. I also felt that the best way to honour both my younger self and my original editors at Bloomsbury, who saw that seed of potential in The Bone Season, was to remain faithful to the same course of events, with a couple of exceptions. The bones of this story still belong to the writer I was in 2011. My older self has simply filled the intercostal space, connecting those bones in slightly different ways.
While the Anniversary Edition of The Bone Season will eventually supplant the original in bookshops, the 2013 edition will always exist in readers’ collections, allowing for direct comparisons. This was, and remains, a perturbing thought – but I am willing to live with it, such is the strength of my conviction that I needed to do this story justice. I hope I have achieved that now, in 2023.
If this is your first time reading The Bone Season, thank you for picking it up. I am currently working on the fifth book in the series, with two more to go. I couldn’t be more excited to know I am now building on a stronger foundation. If you’ve already read and loved the books, or you’ve given it a second chance, I truly hope you have enjoyed this fresh take on the adventure.
Either way … welcome, or welcome back, to Scion.