Today it gives the Speculative Fiction Showcase great pleasure to interview Sun Hesper Jansen, author of To Tune the Beast.
We’re here to discuss your novel To Tune the Beast, which had its debut in February 2024. Tell us about the original inspiration for the world of Coruscar, and how you came to create it.
The Beasts and their Tuners came by way of a fever dream about ten years ago. When I think of it, how else would I have ever come up with a colossal crystalline manticore whose coat makes music? In my dream, there was only one of them, and one pair of Tuners, who would become Master Euclase and his apprentice, Mica. (A boy, I thought at first, but in the writing, she turned out to be genderfluid, skewing feminine.) I started to write a short story about these people, and a particularly dangerous Tuning that would test Mica’s mettle, but when I started to ask all the questions about how such a spectacle came to be, I realized there were multiple Beasts and a whole Guild of Tuners, and a thoroughly bizarre nation and planet (Karst) that produced them, and Coruscar kind of ran away with me, until I was sitting with the first book in a duology about a tyrannical musical aristocracy about to undergo a long-overdue revolution.
Music is the most important element in Coruscar. What can you tell us about the Beasts of the title and why music is so significant?
The Beasts, properly known as Cores, are considered the Founders of Coruscar, and are only one of many sentient non-Humans who have citizenship there and sovereignty over their own affairs. That said, they’re inextricably linked with Humanity, for better and worse. They were created by the Vah, who are gods on this world, and who have secrets the Cores were built to protect. But because the gods are greedy for novelty and also cruel, their creations were also designed to entertain them, willingly or not. When the Cores escape their slavery, it gives them agency over their own music, but it’s interesting what they choose to do with it after they make contact with the Humans. Because they possess affinity—an empathic and sometimes telepathic sense shared by many beings in this world but not by Humanity until the Cores cause it to awaken in some of them (creating the future aristocracy)—they’re able to hear not only the music the people make together but also the memories of the music carried from their various homelands. There’s an orchestral tradition in one of those cultures that leaves a major impression on the Cores, and this is what evolves into High Music, which the aristocracy of Coruscar comes to hold sacred and separate from People’s Music, the music of the commoners. The Tuners Guild is born when the Beasts realize that the pitches of their spines can be altered, giving them a potential part in any symphony. The process of Tuning is not painful, per se, but so unpleasant that it drives the Cores a bit crazy, making this dangerous work for the Tuners. The fact that the Beasts have put up with this repeatedly for nearly 200 years shows you how dependent on music they are. The reason for this has a lot to do with affinity. Imagine yourself as an adept (someone with that empathic sense) experiencing a symphony under a vast high-desert sky, in a natural amphitheater, with thousands of people like you. That communal rapture is colloquially known as the Rush, and the Beasts are in no way immune to it.
The Rush is also not limited to High Music. People’s Music is just as important in Coruscar, but the restrictions placed on it by the Human government are what give the book its central story. High Composers can enjoy and even play People’s Music, and steal from it with impunity, but the reverse is a capital offense. (The Cores, who have a taste for Human flesh, benefit from those executions, and are haunted by that, sometimes literally.) There’s an entire Licensing Authority whose job it is to ensure that so-called Afterdarkers (People’s musicians) play only what they’re allowed to play. One of my protagonists, Chalcy, is a songwriter in the Afterdark and a would-be High Composer who takes advantage of those laws to get herself heard by one of the Beasts. The stunt has a few unintended consequences.
How did you set about world-building and how did it evolve as you were writing?
Everything grew from the music I was listening to at the time. Once I had a grasp of the world’s music, popular and classical, I had my three root-cultures. (Coruscarians, being descendants of a wild Gold-Rush-like historical moment called the Gem Rush, are a mix of three nationalities, and it’s not uncommon to mix or change ethnic identities, sometimes day to day.) One musical style, Taravi Theater, spawned a subculture so competitive they’re basically gangs; Chalcy is part of that world. As for High Music, with its hundreds of Modes dependent on time of day, season, and/or theme, it was as much inspired by Indian ragas as it was European-rooted classical music. All of that helped me get inside the minds of the Human citizens. The non-Humans, beginning with the Cores and the feline Joffeen, grew up alongside my Human characters, because I wanted Coruscar to be a totally integrated society where there’s a basic commitment to peaceful coexistence. There’s a paradox, however. For the Humans, violence against another species is an unthinkable crime (they’re all vegetarians, by the way) and yet they tacitly accept the oppression of their own people, harm themselves regularly, and routinely turn a blind eye to injustice. That side of our actual nature, balanced with the better angels that nevertheless do emerge, also guided the book. Then the characters that popped up as I was fleshing out the world kind of took control, demanding that their stories be told. Somehow they managed to be patient while I excavated the full story over the next seven-eight years.
Tell us about the Vah, the gods of Coruscar. What role do they play?
The Vah are shadowy characters in every sense. They usually take a vaguely humanoid, smoky shape, and there are seven of them. Without them, Coruscar wouldn’t exist. The Gem Rush was the result of a contest in 1729 between two of the gods, which backfired on the Vah thanks to their role in a massacre of innocent beings which the pre-affinity humans didn’t realize were sentient. Because of their past abuses, the gods have limited powers in Coruscar. Only in their own temples are they sovereign, and even there, unless they’re riding a priest, they can only show themselves in reflective surfaces. They’re forbidden to interfere with or manipulate anyone but their priests, unless they’re directly prayed to—but those prayers might also be ignored. Humans can beg boons of the Vah, but supplicants beware, because every boon is a bargain and unless you specify your terms, who knows what you’ve exchanged for their blessings? (No fewer than three of my characters discover this the hard way.) But the true extent of their powers is unknown, at least in Book One. They clearly have the ability to create entities and to tinker with individuals and entire species, drawing on multiple dimensions—which is how Humans come to be on Karst at all. Outside Coruscar, they’re infamous for starting wars, driving people insane, and generally sowing discord. Inside Coruscar, Humanity mistrusts them, but largely ignores them, with one exception. The god Shavaön, the Player, is the god of music and time, and also a trickster. Nobody can resist a trickster.
Your protagonist is Mica, a Tuner who falls in love with a Composer. What can you tell us about their relationship?
Mica is eighteen when she meets Chalcy (who’s a few years older) at a public reception for a symphony. Mica has no love for High Music, is a devoted promoter of the Afterdark, and also a bit of a rake because that’s how she copes with the Toll, the price Tuners pay in order to have their unique relationships with the Cores, among other perks of the trade. Tuners are forbidden to have any emotional bond, even with each other, and the punishment for breaching that contract is exile of the loved one from Coruscar. Chalcy has been a fan of Mica’s for years, and gets herself noticed without revealing the fact that she’s a convicted criminal who was arrested for writing music above her class. Chalcy manages to get herself indentured to the most frightening of the Cores, the half-mad Garanat, who lets her compose the music of her dreams, but only in secret and for him alone. Initially, she seeks Mica out because she’s miserable at Garanat Keep, has lost hope of ever getting her music heard by the outside world, and wants a witness to it as well as a decent hookup with her idol, but the two soon become emotionally entangled regardless of the risks. The challenges of keeping their relationship hidden are what accidentally connects Mica to some other people she’s not supposed to get close to, but who give her a chance to make as much of a difference to Coruscar’s future as Chalcy hopes to with her music.
Chalcy’s brother Nix is a leader of the resistance to the world’s rigid hierarchy, a movement called The Absent Root. Who are they and what are they trying to achieve?
The Absent Root are a group of Afterdarkers whose guiding ambition is the elimination of the barrier between People’s and High Music. They’re considered a terrorist organization even though Nix, when he becomes the leader of the Movement after Chalcy’s arrest, makes a lot of positive reforms to the group, and tries to distance it from the violence that drove it underground. The A.R. is the natural enemy of a different political organization called the Fermata Society, whose goal is to keep everything as it’s been for the last 200 years—not only with the musical landscape, but with Coruscar’s social structure. I haven’t talked about this yet, but the country’s imminent Bicentennial in 1929 is a pivotal social moment: it’s supposed to usher in a new phase towards Coruscar’s ultimate goal of affinity for all, and allow highbloods and commoners to intermarry for the first time. What happens to the musical divide at that time is up for debate, but the Fermata is determined to keep the Merger from happening, and to protect High Music at any cost. That includes sending an innocent Afterdarker to his death at the beginning of the book, which turns into a galvanizing event for the Absent Root.
Your bio describes you as “a poet and writer of dark, queer-normative, irrepressibly romantic fantasy”. What does that mean to you?
I think I started calling my fiction ‘dark romantic fantasy’ to distinguish it from ‘romantic fantasy’ which is a lot more light-hearted. Not that there’s no levity or comic relief in To Tune the Beast—I definitely had fun with some scenes and characters—but the first epigraph of the book actually says “expect no comfort here.” Most of the people I write about have painful lives and histories and they engage with depression and suicide a lot more openly and directly than we generally like to in our society. But my characters do find comfort with others who are also discovering what it takes to thrive in a place where literal empathy exists and yet people can still be horrible to each other. Many of these relationships fall in the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, but in Coruscar, that designation doesn’t exist. People are either svai (attracted to each other) or they’re not, bisexuality is assumed by default, and gender fluidity is commonplace. I’ve wanted to live in a world like that for most of my life, so that’s the world I chose to write, and in some small way, will into being. Of course I’m still deeply cynical about human nature, so Coruscar had to be a dystopia for other reasons. But there’s enough hope in me that I can still imagine a world where love flourishes in all its forms. I wish there was a better word in English than ‘romantic’ to describe that view of life, but I think I’m stuck with it.
To what extent does the novel reflect on issues of tyranny and artistic freedom in our world?
About a decade ago, I heard a talk by China Miéville in which he delivered the unforgettable line, ‘We live in a utopia; it’s just not ours.’ That concept was in the back of my mind the whole time I was writing. Coruscar has some truly enviable aspects. Racism has never taken root, conquest and war are seen as evil, and a gift economy has eradicated greed as we know it under Capitalism. But just like here, any legitimate social good is undermined by hierarchical thinking and gatekeeping. I suspect anyone reading this book who’s ever experienced the savagery of academia, or failed to be accepted into a university program or a competitive workshop, or who just can’t get their work seen because they don’t have the right connections, will relate to the desperation felt by some of the characters in my book. Moreover, in Coruscar, not only are musicians of both classes locked in place by the government and by the Academy of High Musical Arts, but the dead are just as active as the living in preserving the status quo. The Fermata is a pretty obvious stand-in for the stranglehold of conservative, reactionary, patriarchal power in our world.
In Coruscar, death is not final, and there are different dimensions and levels of reality. How do these work in practice?
I’ll start with the living. If you lack affinity, your only accessible world is Realside, which is the world everyone experiences with their flesh senses. If you have latent affinity, you might be slightly sensitive to other dimensions, which fall under the single designation of Alterside. Chalcy is unaware of her affinity until an audience with one of the Cores, Realgar (also a trickster), spirits her consciousness into a world of his making. Alterside contains so many dimensions that some of them can exist just between two or more people, which is how Composers compose their music, a process more like painting or cinema than anything we know. It’s also how Tuners keep their clients even minutely calm during a Tuning—by going Alterside with them and offering any distraction they can. Working with the Beasts in general requires splitting your consciousness so you can be partly Realside and partly Alterside, but nobody’s as proficient at this as a Tuner. For one thing, when you’re more than 25 meters up in the air, Realside, it’s a long way down if you get distracted by, for example, a small, adorable octopus.
To the dead—the unpeacefully dead, also called revenants—Alterside is ‘the Alterlife’ because that’s all they’ve got now. It tends to begin as a sort of geographical crisis. One of my main revenant characters, the martyred Afterdarker Sid, is freed from the terrifying moment of his death only to discover that he can’t get anywhere he hadn’t thoroughly mapped in life. He can only move between the bars he played and hung out in while he was alive and the apartments he shared with his lovers. (Relatable, I’m sure, by a few of us.) Revenants need strong emotional attachments (including ancestral bonds) to link them to the living. They’re invisible to each other unless they make the effort to be seen. They can, fortunately, learn, and in groups they have power Realside that doesn’t exist when working individually. In the book there are examples of positive and negative ghostly collectives. Final death is actually always an option, but my dead keep finding things that make them keep wanting to turn the page. Hopefully this also happens to a few of my readers. It’s a long book!
To Tune the Beast is the first book in a duology. How do you see the second part developing?
The first book, without being a cliffhanger, clearly sets the stage for To Heal the Beast, which will be a bit more traditionally questy. There are stories I barely touched on in Book One that we finally get to see developed, especially that of Master Euclase, and his complicated friendship with the fun but morally grey scholar Tsavor Marl. I get to transmigrate a soul or two, which will be awesome. And the number of readers who’ve confided that they really don’t like Chalcy can take heart; a good chunk of Book Two is what I’m calling Operation Humanize Chalcy, and it isn’t necessarily going to be Mica who helps achieve this. Mica will be a bit preoccupied with sorting her own self out with an enemies-to-friends arc I can’t wait to dig into. I’ve already given too many spoilers, so suffice it to say, all of the characters you want to see survive do so, in one shape or another. And I’m committed to ending the saga within two books, because I personally hate all the fill that goes into trilogies. (“There’s a lot going on” is a tactful critique of Book One that I’ve heard more than a few times, but the same people also admit there are zero throwaway scenes.) My aim is for Coruscar to become as addictively real to the reader as it is to me by the end of the second book, and they’ll be ready for the stand-alone novels I already have planned which take place elsewhere on Karst.
You are a linguist, and invented languages play an important role in To Tune the Beast. How do you go about creating such languages, something that was shared by Tolkien and Ursula Le Guin?
I feel pretty lazy compared to those two… I’m still working on the grammars for Taravi and Dvosk, but this is nerdy fun and even on a day I can’t write, I can at least say I’m working. My methodology is pretty much combining the phonetic and syntactic features of about 15 languages that I’ve either dabbled in or studied long enough to make part of my subconscious. Dvosk might sound Slavic and Taravi might sound a bit like Greek, but I wanted these conlangs to seem only vaguely Earthly. Tying in again with music, I suppose, acoustic phonetics is my favorite area of linguistics, so I mainly build phrases out of sounds that are a pleasure to pronounce. But I also needed a believable syntax for each of my languages, and one cool enough to concisely express ideas we can’t in English. So in Dvosk I ended up with the Chinese-inspired modal particle éi, which allows you, with a single syllable, to change “I loved him” (kiranán) to “I used to love him but I don’t anymore” (kirananéi)—and if you make that daréi instead (kiranandaréi) you’re saying that this situation changed very recently. There are also visual languages in the book—Signspeech among Humans, and the Joffeen have an Alterside-based language that is all imagery. The Joffy Perfidy is a great example; there are no motion pictures in Coruscar (yet) but Perfidy’s real name is like the shortest horror film ever made.
You are living with MS. What impact does this have on you as a writer, in practical and creative terms?
In practical terms, cognitive dysfunction, numbness, and fatigue are my most common and debilitating symptoms. Sitting down at a computer to write for more than 20 minutes is problematic. If I push myself to write for hours, or get on a creative tear, I can lose several days to a flare-up. This was particularly rough while I was still working a full- then part-time job, which is why this first book took so long to write. After I went on permanent disability, I was able to make progress because I had more time and (sometimes) more energy, which is why I’m optimistic about the second book taking significantly shorter to complete. Creatively, my MS often finds a better outlet in poetry than prose. My debut book of poems and artwork, Fairy of Disenchantment, is a sort of chronicle of my life with MS and how I use fantasy and magical realism (and actual magic) to cope with it. In my fiction, I can see disability all through To Tune the Beast. Even apart from a visibly disabled character, Mica’s nemesis Vanadine, there are invisible disabilities galore. If you look at my revenant characters, the Alterlife is absolutely a metaphor for living with a disability. Chronic illness severs you from all normalcy. Socially, you often become invisible. Spiritually and physically, you can believe you’re trapped in some other, parallel dimension. These are things I didn’t realize I was expressing in the book until well after I’d finished it.
How do you see your readers, and who will enjoy the book?
Well, people who are enticed to open a 700-page book with a manticore on the cover, then see a map, a cast of characters, a pronunciation guide, a glossary, scholarly/funny/intriguing epigraphs and footnotes, and get progressively excited and possibly even turned on by these things… Those are my readers right off the bat. I also wrote it for people who take their time with books, who want to be immersed in a world and become a citizen of it, and who appreciate narratives that value wonder over sword fights. I don’t have any of those. I do have deadly creatures, but no dragons. Wait, I guess there are some of those. Little ones. And they have been known to incinerate people, but everybody’s trying to move on from that. I also have a judicious amount of sex and violence, but I can promise you that nobody you come to care for dies. Except the one guy who dies right away, and you’ll come to care for him so much more when he’s dead.
What do you want readers to take away from To Tune the Beast?
A head full of imagined music and the overwhelming urge to support their local Afterdark, take in a symphony or two, and trample a few barriers.
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About Sun Hesper Jansen:
Sun Hesper Jansen is a poet and writer of dark, queer-normative, irrepressibly romantic fantasy based in Madison, Wisconsin. They are the author of To Tune the Beast (fir st book in the 'Coruscar' duology), the open-source novelette Away from the Machine, and the poetry and art collection, The Fairy of Disenchantment.
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