Samantha Shannon is only 21-years-old and just graduated from Oxford. But she’s already set for the next few years of her life thanks to The Bone Season, the first volume in a seven-book series that publisher Bloomsbury has so much confidence in that they’re paying her six figures. It’s already being compared to Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, lofty comparisons to live up to.

With The Bone Season’s release this week, Shannon has sat down for interviews, discussing what it’s like to have success at a young age and her plans for the series’ future. The book is set in 2059 in a dystopian future. The lead character is 19-year-old Paige Mahoney, a clairvoyant who accidentally kills two officers. She’s then taken from London to Oxford, which has been taken over by a species called Rephaites.

She spoke with Vanity Fair, revealing that she initially thought she’d need a pseudonym. But she explained, “I think [sci-fi] has kind of lost that male-centric idea, with people like Suzanne Collins and so on having had success writing under women’s names, so in the end I just thought, ‘O.K. I am just going to write under my name,’ and I am really glad I did.”

Shannon also said that she’d rather not be called the next J.K. Rowling, but the “first Samantha Shannon.” “I don’t think the book is particularly like anything by J. K. Rowling,” she explained. “I am obviously a massive fan, so it is kind of uncomfortable for me, because if you say that someone is the new something, it suggests that there is something wrong with the old.”

According to the BBC, the book’s film rights were already snapped up by Andy Serkis’ The Imaginarium and it will be published in 20 countries, which she called “overwhelming.”

“I've had these characters in my head for two years and it's amazing to finally share them,” she told the BBC.

She has a “skeleton” idea for the future of the series, she told Vanity Fair, and does have a few actors in mind for the film version. While she said that she has had trouble envisioning what Paige would like like in real life, she has ideas for the supporting parts. “...Jackson [Paige’s boss in London] definitely would be Benedict Cumberbatch, and Nick [Paige’s hapless best friend] would definitely be Alexander Skarsgård,” she told Vanity Fair. “That would be my ideal cast.”

The Bone Season is available in the U.S. starting today.

image: Amazon