To Tune the Beast is a perspicacious polemic. A gentle raging at a lack of parity and fairness, set against a backdrop of passionate elegy for music. Initially this is a plenary story of reconciliation and growth within a subjugated society that isn’t aware that tyranny is eating them from inside out. The reader will oft relate to how this echoes our own experiences. In this mode of sci-fi-fantasy, the concept of being free musically is a metaphor to action. Hence the polemic.
Labyrinthine concepts are juggled boldly. Characters are multifarious and three-dimensional, they’re reachable and possible to understand as they’re written into reality without self-consciousness. Hesper Jansen knows how to write for an audience but isn’t a writer who panders to one. Her writing gives the impression of writing for the love of writing, rather than being forced or artificial. The structure is tight and well-paced, which is essential when falling down the rabbit hole of sci-fi-fantasy. Balance is necessary to ensure one is writing succinctly enough to engage and compel without dumbing down an intelligent story. A sci-fi-fantasy writer must create a world and then help their readers master the translation.
It would be folly to imagine it’s easy to read an intelligent sci-fi-fantasy novel, but once committed, the writer’s gift draws out sufficient enticement without smothering the reader in lore. Whilst highly ambitious for a first novel, To Tune the Beast is written dauntlessly and with a nimble mind at the helm. The result is Coruscar. When we meet the Cores, mythic beasts with approachable, humorous, horrifying personalities, they are at times as intricate as their human tuners. It is the arc of a writer formidably familiar with their chosen genre, who can become enveloped by the strangeness of fantasy, and vividly render the fantastical to be experienced as real. The best fantasy feels intuitively real, hence our worthwhile investment.
Coruscar is a little like our own world, and at the same time, very different. The rundown, delightful drinking haunts with glorious, undomesticated monikers, and the potential for nights spent in these grimy snuff boxes to be one’s last night alive. A delicious turning from humor to danger and back again with every rove. The novel is ribboned with modern considerations about the price we pay for choices and actions (the Toll), from ungendering and natural rejection of labels affixed to biological sex or partnering, to myriad notions of morality and what consciousness is, versus dying, versus living in alternate states of reality. But beyond the ingenious and the philosophical, what really endures most of all is the attention to detail in depicting humanity’s worst, feral bright and best, in this strange world.
What to say of all those creatures who tread this stage? There are so many brilliant creations it’s impossible, without giving too much away, which absolutely would ruin a future reader’s delight when the book reveals itself. I can say, my personal favorites surprised me. The rapacious unseen gods, ‘Vah,’ are a doff to the distant masked creatures of all fantasy novels, and seen at a distance, I found them both terrifying and fascinating. There is a heady blend of influences from ancient Greece to Star Wars, Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin. I should point out, influence does not denote affect or copy, as this is a wholly original write; though any artist must understand what came before them, as they write into the canon or break it wide open.
That the author is a linguist comes out many times in the expert care with which she describes the varied languages and inflections. You discover a love for the wordplay of several created languages that appear more real and urgent than they should, perhaps because of the way in which little intimacies are laced in each chapter, like hors d'oeuvres before a feast. The complexity isn’t only found in witty wordplay or knowledge of linguistics, but the way the writer takes created languages and affectations and translates them into something that feels both familiar and otherworldly. Ale!
To the gist of the story then: Coruscar, a mythical place, is inhabited by several groups. The Beasts, created by the Vah, who are Gods of this world, become more self-aware through the enlightenment of another similar creature, so that they can break the spell of being the God’s playthings.
“I remember that now about the Vah: They eat nothing but prayers, and drink only regrets.”
Without knowing the exact purpose of their existence, they are freed mentally, just as Eve, no longer the ingénue, plunges to earth in Milton’s Paradise Lost, wracked with the pains of a new awareness. However, in Coruscar, the Beasts find themselves with a modicum of potential power over an intrigued population consisting of human and non-human inhabitants. What is most interesting about this is the Beast’s early choice to stay with the humans and become part of a strange, overly-orchestrated mechanism. This mechanism revolves around the importance of music and its performance. Not just any kind of music. There are those who are considered born to it and those who, despite prodigious talent, do not have a chance in hell to attain it. There are strict rules to be adhered to in this control of music, and the breaking of them results in a hideous death.
This rulebook is not created by the Gods, who are largely feared but superficial to the goings on in Coruscar. Humans and their otherworldly counterparts are the machinations behind a series of oblique social constrictions that divide everyone into rigid, unyielding class structures: those who perform High Music and those who are forbidden to play it. This is furthered by the Beasts, who possess literal scales that can be tuned and become the swell and greatest part of Coruscar symphonies. Their presence and appreciation of this music, along with the respective Keeps entourage, is the cornerstone of Coruscar society, for those intimately included and those who dream of such privilege from afar. If you are born without such blood, you are relegated to playing out of sight and sound, at great personal risk if that music should overstep one of the many rules. Should you accidentally or intentionally play High Music then your life is forfeit.
Enter key protagonists; there is Chalcy, who rides her Joffeen, Perfidy. A Joffeen being a smaller but equally lethal prototype of the Beasts. Chalcy possesses the musical intuitiveness, but not the necessary permission. Her fate is to fall in love with an apprentice to Tuning (the Beasts). All Tuners are forbidden to have relationships, that’s the Toll they pay for their socially elevated status. Their relationship, aside being necessarily secret, is the backdrop to greater intrigues; that of Chalcy’s brother, Nix, leader of The Absent Root, which is an underground movement against musical tyranny and perhaps one of the best fictional inventions of rebellion I’ve read.
A note here about The Absent Root. It’s packed with colorful characters in insalubrious situations that alone would make a vastly interesting book. This is but one facet of a far wider storyline. Nix is tormented by his role as leader, as his heart too seeks a particular fate. All characters are wildly chronologically young and free of convention, aside the terrible requirement to not play particular music outside the confines of special bloodlines. Unbeknownst to those perpetuating such tributaries, there is a larger force seeking to overthrow this. One nobody suspects.
We have Vanadine and Dama, characters so damaged by their own respective choices for cruelty that initially it’s impossible to stand them. Their interior universes are mined chapter by chapter. What betrayal when, by the close of this story, we are rooting for their success! Speaking more of the manipulation of a good storyteller to turn our fickle hearts from disgust to a very human awareness of mistakes and their eternal stain on us, even as we seek reparation. In some ways this is a metaphor for the larger story, where rules lead to oppression, to insight and the breaking of such life sentences. A literal breathing of life into those thought irredeemable. It is the imperfection that has you panting heavily because it’s rendered without apology and with the piquant droll humor that permeates this novel.
“Absence, both real and potential, had begun to haunt her, in all the places the dead no longer stirred.”
Set against this intrigue is the poignant story of Syd and Jass, two lovers separated by the inconvenience of death. The gist of this novel may be the reality of music to change everything, but there is a liberal heaping of good old-fashioned attachment here too. We long for certain people to remain together, even as the author refuses such pastiches with a scouring lack of sentimentality that can be equally visceral in opposite intensity when permitted. As To Tune the Beast grows in gravitas, more characters reveal themselves in greater dimension and again and again we long and fall with their urges and disappointments. Ultimately however, there are those who find their way to each other, and we are rewarded for our loyalty to their fates.
“There are plenty of quirks of Humanity that Coruscarians don’t like to admit to having failed to breed out of ourselves. For those, we use the T’aravi word onziva, which translates most often into Sul as ‘unnatural.’ It means ‘against life’ and encompasses many illnesses of mind, including cases where what cuts against the life of one can be another’s delight.”
There is a necessity in mentioning the difference between a sci-fi-fantasy novel written by a biological male versus a biological female. Such distinctions are being erased as we go forward, with notable wins over predictable biological tropes, but that said, the sci-fi-fantasy market was historically a male-dominated world, from scantily clad women on the covers, to explicit male-centric sex scenes. I for one, having grown up reading these, am gladdened to read To Tune the Beast and other modern fantasy novels written by biological females, where intimacy is truly intimate, and the size of one’s bosom not the most important fact. This reclaiming of imagination superseding the need to insert clumsy sexual parodies is the New Wave in queer + /BIPOC fantasy literature, alongside greats like Shelley Parker-Chan, Charlie Jane Anders and Rebecca Roanhorse.
Many novels create mimeographed mythical creatures, but once they have, they let them loose in haphazard awkward ways that sadly can end up being annoying and pastiche. Appreciating the alacrity of a controlled writer, able to grow complex characters throughout a relatively long novel, is something rarefied. These mythic beasts are approachable, they have foibles and humor and tragedy. They are not two-dimensional for the sake of being creations, nor do they act like self-conscious creations, so much as having jumped the assembly line and run their own way. Reading characters freed of the author’s rein is exciting, as the author is in control enough to know when their own ego should be set aside for the betterment of organic character development. The entirety of Coruscar, is replete with deeply considered storylines, people and places. The events that wind throughout are suspenseful, often unpredictable and well fleshed out. If you seek action-galore you’ll be left searching, as action here takes a back row to an almost cerebral journey of discovery.
A good fantasy must possess this degree of commitment to every created facet within its universe, regardless of how much or little action occurs therein. It is the puncture of the characters that causes the addiction, not how many times someone fires a weapon, and I for one found this very appealing. I particularly relished the idea of several dimensions, the real world, the Alter world and then beyond the state of consciousness. The merging of those who no longer live but are not dead, with the living in varied states of consciousness, especially when talking with people who have that gift such as the Beasts, benefited the storyline(s), as we are not just in one world, one consciousness. When Sun Hesper Jansen talks of affinity it is not just an ability to mind-step from one dimension to another, it’s an intimacy we all long for, brought to life. An intimacy we’ll never feel, but we desperately want to, so we allow words that we cannot convey, to take us there via the art of fantasy:
“I got the strong sense that his silence was not just because he wasn’t allowed to talk about the rite, but because there were simply not words for the experience.”
Ultimately, I found myself wishing I could talk to my ancestors, or a loved one past, with the freedom of those in Coruscar. I wished to ride a Joffeen, fall in love with someone who renounced pronouns and wore velvet in hot cramped music bars, and wished with all my might for a fairness that never exists and music capable of destroying you and putting you back together. What I can tell you, is this is a world you’ll become submerged in, and wish you didn’t have to leave, which quite simply is why we love sci-fi-fantasy novels, especially those too clever to be anything less than wicked smart.
“Humans are very hung up on their life’s purpose… for as long as she has known him, he has never asked himself, What’s my reason for living? He asks Joffeen questions, like What could happen next? Or What happens if I do this, now? Or if I wait and see?”
The level of care and planning in mapping Coruscar and her people is evident. Not least in the humor, plethora of destinations, internal conflicts, elaborate detailing of costume and personhood. You will smile, gnash your teeth, flinch and feel guilty shame, entering Hesper Jansen’s hybrid brain, where a unique countercurrent of modern and otherworldly, harmonize around a deep love of music and its potential for everything. Blessed beasts indeed.
by Candice Daquin
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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.
The Fairy of Disenchantment | Away from the Machine | Instagram
