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Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/05/21/the-big-idea-adam-oyebanji-2/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=55728

Inspiration can come from anywhere, even from a nautical legal case from the 1700s. Author Adam Oyebanji lets us glimpse into some marines’ tragic pasts in the Big Idea for his newest novel, Esperance. Dive in and see where the waves take you.

ADAM OYEBANJI:

If I were ever reckless enough to confess my faults, I’d admit to being nosy, easily distracted and addicted to tea.  To my mind, at least, these are forgivable foibles.  People in glass houses and all that.  However, I’m also a lawyer and pretty freaking unrepentant about it.  A wig and gown in England, charcoal suits in Illinois, juries in both places.  Feel free to judge, but if you do, remember that judges are lawyers too.  I’m just saying.

Before I was a lawyer, though, I was a law student.  In England.  Which is important, because law in England is an undergraduate program in a country where the legal drinking age is eighteen.  Torts in the afternoon, tequilas in the evening, and who has time for mornings?  The high-pressure seriousness of a US law school is mostly missing.  I say “mostly” because some people are incapable of a good time at any age.  So, let’s acknowledge them in passing and move on.  Law school English style is one part learning, one part good times with a dash of heartache.  Oh, and get this.  In my day it was ABSOLUTELY FREE.  We got paid to go there.  Hand to God.

Admittedly, this was a long time ago.  So long ago, in fact, that we cracked open actual books instead of laptops.  Books that, in addition to the assigned reading, contained hundreds of cases that were of absolutely no interest to my professors.

But if one happened to be a hungover law student who was both nosy and easily distracted, the assigned reading could rapidly lose its allure.  Who cares about the rule against perpetuities anyway?

Now that I come to think about it, and having practiced law for more years than I’m going to admit to, I still don’t care about the rule against perpetuities.  But I digress.

The point about a nosy, easily distracted law student poking about in a book is that it’s a book.  Books, unlike a computerized law report, are completely non-linear. You can riffle the pages and land on something completely different almost without conscious effort.  Forward, backward, upside-down if you like, it’s all too easy to get lost in other people’s long-ago legal troubles, because those, let me tell you, are way more interesting than whether X has created a future interest in property that vests more than twenty-one years after the lifetimes of persons living at the time of the creation of the interest.  (You cannot make this stuff up).

Rather than deal with the assigned boredom, I spent a chunk of this particular afternoon in the Eighteenth century: duels, infidelity, murder and, of course, marine insurance.

Now, when it comes to boredom, the law of marine insurance is hard to beat.  Except for this.  If a marine insurance case makes it into a law report, the underlying disaster, the thing that triggers the insurance claim, can be kind of interesting.  In this particular case, from 1783, the claim arose out of a voyage of such incompetence and cruelty that just reading about it took my breath away.  People died.  A lot of people.  And all anyone seemed to care about afterward was the value of the claim.  I had nightmares about it.  Even now, I sometimes have dreams so vivid I can hear the waves slapping against that ancient, wooden hull, the screaming of lost souls as things go horribly, irretrievably sideways.

And that might have been it, had it not been for my addiction to the stuff that made Boston Harbor famous.  I’m standing on my front porch, well into my sixth cup of tea when it hits me: the big idea.  Why not use the facts of this nightmarish shipping claim as the inciting incident of a novel?  And not a historical novel, but a sci-fi one, where the consequences carry forward to the present? A story about a Chicago cop who’s in way over his head, chasing a seemingly invincible criminal dead-set on writing an old wrong.  A story about a woman out of her own time and place prepared to do drastic things in expiation of sins that are not her own.  A story where human justice clashes with inhuman crimes in a deadly conflict of values.  Why not, once I’ve finished my beverage, go back inside and write that story?

So I did.  I called it Esperance.

Esperance: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Books-A-Million|Bookshop

Author socials: Website

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/05/21/the-big-idea-adam-oyebanji-2/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=55728