Review of To Tune the Beast by Sun Hesper Jansen, by Candice Daquin

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

Interview with Sun Hesper Jansen, author of To Tune the Beast

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.

Amazon | Waterstones | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop

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

Interview with Rebecca Gomez Farrell, author of Wings Unfurled (Book 2 of Wings Rising)

Today it gives the Speculative Fiction Showcase great pleasure to interview Rebecca Gomez Farrell, whose novel Wings Unfurled is our featured new release on December 6.

Wings Unfurled is a sequel to your first novel, Wings Unseen. How did you come to write a sequel and was that your original intention?

When I began daydreaming about writing this fantasy story, way back in college in the early 2000s, I always assumed it would be a trilogy—it’s fantasy, right?! But once I began writing the first book, Wings Unseen, in earnest, the going advice for debut novelists, even in fantasy, was to aim for a standalone novel rather than a series. I took that advice and managed to tell the whole story I envisioned in one book, rather than three. That ultimately made for a much stronger book! But by its publication, I thought I had told all the story about Lansera, the main kingdom in the books, and its characters that I wanted to tell.

Meerkat Press’s publisher, Tricia Meeks, encouraged me to consider a sequel, so the what ifs started rolling around in my head after Wings Unseen’s publication in 2017. I am not a fast writer, and it took probably a year until I could really envision a new story told in this world. But once I could, I absolutely wanted to peel back the next layer of Lanserim spirituality, magic, and culture and the lives of my main characters and share them with readers.

You introduced the countries of Medua and Lansera in Wings Unseen. What can you tell us about them and their world?

A few generations before Wings Unseen starts, Lansera was the only country in this world. It’s ruled mostly wisely by the Albrecht line of monarchs, regional nobles, and town councils. Its citizens are generally motivated to be good people, and they have a strong connection to their goddess Madel. 

A portion of the Lanserim populace decided that they were tired of living by acceptable social mores, and that prizing themselves over others sounded a lot more fun and rewarding. So they rebelled, and a bitter civil war ensued. Ultimately, the Lanserim king ceded the rebels a portion of their lands to stop the bloodshed. That land became Medua, and it was quickly overrun by the most brutal rebels who used a false religion to establish a harsh, patriarchal rule over everyone else in Medua for generations.

By the beginning of Wings Unfurled, the Lanserim and Meduan peoples have been reunited for six years. They’ve learned that Lansera turning a blind eye to the horrors the Meduan rulers visited on their own people ultimately hurt the Lanserim as well. But the reunification of two cultures that have lived by very, very different morals while apart is not easy, and lingering resentment on both sides threatens to boil over into open fighting again.

When Wings Unfurled is published, Wings Unseen will be reissued with new cover art. What prompted that decision and what is the significance of the beautiful stag on the cover of Wings Unfurled?

We decided to correct a mistake we’d made when first marketing Book 1, Wings Unseen. We’d categorized it as young adult fantasy, but that never really fit the book, despite two out of three main characters being teenagers. It reads more as adult epic fantasy. So Tricia and I decided that recategorizing both books made sense, especially with the characters having aged in Wings Unfurled. New cover art is essential to appeal to a new audience, and you want that instant brand recognition across a series. Thus, new cover art! And I am absolutely thrilled to have two gorgeous versions of Wings Unseen artwork now.

The silver stag featured on the cover of Wings Unfurled is a legendary creature that plays a huge role in both books. In Wings Unseen, Janto Albrecht, one of my main characters, slays the stag, fulfilling a prophecy. We learn that the stag is also tied through some sort of essence to Vesperi Sellwyn, another main character and the wielder of the Silver Flame. In Wings Unfurled, that essence is explored more deeply, as is the silver stags’ true nature.

Tell us about the protagonists, Janto, Vesperi, and Serra. How have they changed since the end of Wings Unseen?

Vesperi and Janto have wed, and she now has all the power she ever wanted, both magically and politically. Yet she struggles to find that power can’t fix everything: her and Janto’s daughter Izmareld has disappeared without a trace.  

Vesperi blames Janto for Izzy’s disappearance, and so Janto is at Castle Callyn without his wife’s support. His father is ailing, he may soon become king, but how can he possibly rule a whole country when he couldn’t keep his wife or keep track of his own child? 

Serra still travels the countryside, often as a healer and using her special sight to commune with the spiritual realm. But she is running away from committing to her long-time paramour, Lorne Granich, and her duties as the liege of her home region. Serra has spent so much time sacrificing herself for Lansera, that she can’t imagine what living for herself might look like. Then those dark patches start creeping into her second sight…

As the book begins, all three know the important roles they play as people of prophecy, but they don’t know their own strengths as human beings.

What is the importance of Esye, the silver moon?

I can’t go into detail, as Esye’s importance is a central part of Wings Unfurled! But I can say that Vesperi’s power, the Silver Flame, is drawn from Esye’s essence, and that essence is far more than the mere light that Esye projects onto the Lanserim realm.

When the book begins, Vesperi and Janto have lost their daughter. Tell us about this.

The prologue describes the moment when Izmareld, Vesperi and Janto’s daughter, disappears. She is four, and like many four-year-old children, prone to wandering off when something sparkly catches her eye. Janto commits the grave sin that so many parents fear: letting her out of his sight for a moment. And in that moment, Izzy disappears entirely, leaving no trace. Months have passed by the time Chapter 1 begins. Their stress and heartache over their still missing child are the driving factors in every decision Vesperi and Janto make separately and together, for good or for ill.

 

Serra possesses second sight, which detects a growing evil. How much can you tell us about this new threat?

It’s different than the claren, the invisible insect horde that consumed people from the inside out in Wings Unseen. This threat creeps in slowly, enshrouding its targets in darkness until they can no longer see the light. The claren bred in the tainted spiritual waters that the Meduan evils created; this one flourishes through doubt and despair.

 

As well as this duology, you have written many short stories, which have appeared in magazines, websites, and anthologies including Beneath Ceaseless Skies, It Calls From the Sky, PULP Literature, and A Quiet Afternoon 1 & 2. What are the challenges of writing short fiction and novels and do you use a different method?

I begin short stories and novels in similar ways: a character or a few will come to mind along with a concept I want to explore, and then the mood of the piece. As I begin writing, snatches of scenes appear, and I get a feel for the shape of the story. It is generally quite clear to me from the onset if I’m writing a novel or a short story, however. Only once have I written a short story that I’ve realized would be better served as a novel. That’s still a work in progress.

You are communications director for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA), and helm a local chapter of the national Women Who Submit Lit organization, which encourages all writers who identify as women and/or nonbinary to submit their work for publication. What made you sign up for the former and why is the second important, especially now?

I joined SFWA as soon as I learned about it, which happened to be the same year I qualified to join as an associate, in 2013. Many people don’t realize that SFWA is more than a writers association, it is also a nonprofit that advocates for creators and the SFF genres at large. I had wanted to volunteer more with them, and the pandemic freed up enough of my time that I finally could, so I took over running their social media. Within six months, they offered me a spot on staff, and I accepted, spurred on mostly by my passion for helping communicate the great work SFWA does.

Women Who Submit Lit is a fantastic organization that just received its nonprofit status this year. It’s such a simple concept: women and nonbinary creators come together, in-person or virtually, and spend a few hours focusing on sending their work out for publication. Each time someone hits send, we cheer loudly, providing a burst of endorphins and encouragement to keep sending out more of our work. Especially now, with the publishing industry in constant transition and rejection rates higher than ever, anything that motivates us to keep submitting is beneficial. 

You also co-organize the East Bay Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Meetup Group and administer several discussion groups for women, nonbinary, and Bay Area writers. This sounds fascinating and fun but also time-consuming. How do you manage your time?

The honest answer is that I don’t as well as I’d like! Since the pandemic started, my writing motivation has taken a big hit, especially as my husband began working at home—turns out privacy is essential to my creative process. So I couldn’t write, and I suddenly had time for more online volunteering and event organizing. It has brought me a lot of validation and satisfaction during these tumultuous years.

But I’m now in the process of stepping down from a lot of my extracurriculars, including the East Bay Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Meetup group and the Bay Area Women Who Submit Lit chapter. Though I love their work and support for the writing community, I need to prioritize my own writing again. Luckily, new organizers are stepping up, so they’ll continue to keep going strong! I’ve been running both for 5+ years, and I’m thrilled that my leaving doesn’t mean those groups will stop thriving.

In addition, you write a food, drink, and travel blog, theGourmez.com, which has been going for a decade and a half. What can you tell us about the blog and how far does it influence your fiction? Why would you choose “Absinthe verte, one cube” as your replicator order?

As I often say, my writing and social media posting for The Gourmez influences every tasty bit of my worldbuilding. Food, aromas, textures: these are such powerful conjurers of memory and emotion. Learning how to describe them in salivating detail can be a powerful technique in your writer toolbox. Though I do warn everyone who follows me @theGourmez on social media that my feeds will make you hungry! 

As for my replicator order, I have always been enchanted by the forbidden “banned” lore of absinthe. Since its return to production in the USA, I’ve tried a ton of absinthes, and I simply adore the flavor of black licorice. Absinthe vert means “green absinthe,” though I prefer it if it’s a light natural green from the herbs rather than a vivid one from artificial coloring. One cube refers to the amount of sugar that I like slowly dissolved into my absinthe glass.

Where have your travels taken you and do you have any plans for the immediate future?

Prior to the pandemic, I loved travel! I’ve been to Japan, Romania, the UK, the Netherlands, Mexico, Canada, Jamaica, Costa Rica, and a few other countries. I know it's passé to admit it, but I love hitting up all the standard tourist spots. I’ve often shared travelogues on The Gourmez as well. But this last year, many of the trips I had planned before the pandemic all happened at once, so now…I need a vacation from travel. Hopefully, I’ll get to recharge in 2023. I do have travel planned to NYC in April to take part in the Rooftop Readings series, however!

What are you working on now? Will there be a third volume to follow Wings Unfurled?

My next writing goals are to complete one final revision of my manuscript for the first book in a post-apocalyptic, paranormal romance series and then seek an agent to represent the series. Then I’d really like to return to several short stories that I think are some of my best…but I haven’t had time to work them into masterpieces quite yet. I’ve also begun a horror novel based in the Southwest. Will there be a third Wings Rising book? Well, ask me in a year when potential plot points have had the time to dance around in my head.

Have you any favourite authors or books, inside or outside of the genre?

Inside the genres, I have been most moved by Mary Doria Russell’s duology of The Sparrow and Children of God. I have been most influenced by well-known SFF authors such as Tolkien, of course, George R. R. Martin, and Octavia Butler. I am most inspired by authors who share their experiences with the world through essay, memoir, and literature that manages to convey great truths, such as James Baldwin, Michael W. Twitty, Zora Neale Hurston, Haruki Murakami, and Kurt Vonnegut.

Do you attend conventions and have you got any appearances coming up?

I am not a big convention goer, partially because I do love travel! When I’m visiting somewhere new, I’d rather be outside exploring than inside talking on panels. But I do think the professional development for creators that the Nebula Conference provides is worth those hours spent inside conference rooms, whether in person or online. I also hope to return to Wiscon and Sirens someday, both great conferences that support women in fantasy. I also enjoy my local FogCon and staying abreast of the SFF community in the Bay Area. 

My next reading will be at Story Hour on Wednesday, December 7, at 7:00pm Pacific Time, and I am hosting SFWA’s Weekly Writing Date the following Sunday, December 11, at 2:00pm PT. More events are forthcoming in 2023. I’d be delighted if your readers visited my website, RebeccaGomezFarrell.com, for future event details or joined my newsletter for updates.

Meerkat Press | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo

About Rebecca Gomez Farrell:

Rebecca Gomez Farrell refuses to say “Bloody Mary” three times into a mirror, though she’ll write stories about the people who do. She lives in California’s East Bay with her tech wizard husband and two feline coworkers. Her epic fantasy duology, which includes Wings Unseen and Wings Unfurled, is published by Meerkat Press. Becca’s shorter works have appeared over thirty times in magazines, websites, and anthologies including Beneath Ceaseless Skies, It Calls From the Sky, PULP Literature, and A Quiet Afternoon 1 & 2.

 

Becca is the communications director for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA). She helms a local chapter of the national Women Who Submit Lit organization, which encourages all writers who identify as women and/or nonbinary to submit their work out for publication. She also co-organizes the East Bay Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Meetup Group and administers several discussion groups for women, nonbinary, and Bay Area writers.

 

Over the past decade and a half, her food, drink, and travel blog, theGourmez.com, has influenced every tasty bite of her fictional worldbuilding. Her replicator order is “Absinthe verte, one cube.”

 

Author Website: RebeccaGomezFarrell.com. Social Media: @theGourmez. 

The Vampire by Erme Lander

 

Release date:November 25, 2020

Subgenre: Paranormal romance

About The Vampire:

 

“I do not require your eternal love or devotion Ms Johnson, merely what is inside your veins.”

When Tina Johnson, single mother, forty, wakes up in an isolated castle in Central Europe she simply wants to return to her daughter as quickly as possible. She doesn’t expect to find that she has been kidnapped and brought into a world where power is the key to survival and sanity is an optional extra.

Tina discovers she has been watched for many years, she has a rare genetic structure that makes her attractive to vampires and has the possibility of living for well over a century, if she allows herself to become infected. Kalmár has stolen her and intends to keep her captive, hiding her from both her family and other vampires. Normality becomes a frightening place as Tina struggles to escape those holding her and to fights to keep her daughter, her lover and her freedom.

Those wanting teenage kicks and thrills had better stand aside. This is a story of a woman held hostage with only her own exhausted brain to help. The slow seductive burn of sleepless nights. The nightmare of a horrific reality setting in and the endless patience of a dark being who has time on his side.

Sitting somewhere between Anne Rice and Bram Stoker this is perfect for fans of paranormal romance that want something different to savour. The Vampire Duology is a modern twist on the classic vampire tale.

Please note that this duology consists of "A Dark Inheritance" and "A Dark infection" both available on Amazon as single books.

Excerpt:

 

Kalmár’s eyes watched her, like a cat watching a mouse, waiting for her to move. For a moment Tina returned his look, saw every detail, the huge black pupils in the dim light, the pale skin and the sharp crease of the folded collar against his neck.

The fire snapped a log in the grate and instinct took over. Her bare toes dug into the carpet and she launched herself towards the door. Quick as she was, he reacted faster, reaching out with a long arm to catch her. His fingers closed around her elbow, swinging Tina painfully round. She swiped at him with her other hand and gaped in stupidity, she’d missed. He slapped her, open handed across the face and released her to stumble backwards.

She hit her head against a bookcase and saw lights from the impact. Stunned that he’d hit her, she stood, dazed. He stepped forwards, took both her wrists in one large hand and pinned her there. His face was shadowed, his fingers cool and dry as he began to undo the neck of her shirt.

“No,” Tina whispered. As he ignored it, she tried louder, “No.” She attempted to struggle, to wriggle away, she couldn’t shift him. She pretended to faint, rolled up her eyes and went limp in the hope he’d loosen his grip and she could twist away. It didn’t work. She couldn’t think, didn’t know what to do, her mind blank with panic.

She cried out as he adjusted his grip, forcing her to stand. Kalmár undid her buttons and pulled the shirt collar out of the way. Twisting her arms around to her back, he dragged Tina up to his height, feet dangling off the floor and held her against the bookcase with his body. His free hand grasped her hair and pulled back her head, exposing her neck.

Cool flesh against hers and she felt his fangs slice in. She whimpered softly against him. Then long slow sucking, a monstrous baby feeding. The lights dimmed, haloed, the flickering of the fire beyond him. The dust settled, swirling in patterns. She could feel her heart thumping, working against him, refusing to give in.

Tina went limp with shock and his arms changed from holding her down to cradling her, keeping her upright against him. After what felt like an age he stopped, his tongue nuzzled at the wounds and licked them. He drew his head back. Inspected and licked again.

He picked Tina up easily, carried her over to a reading couch and lay her there. She stared at the ceiling unable to move. She could smell his scent everywhere, cloying with its intensity. Kalmár sat next to her and wiped his mouth with a clean white handkerchief. He reminded Tina of a cat, licking cream off its whiskers. Blood, thought Tina muzzily. My blood. She had no energy left to be anything other than faintly outraged at the sight.

He reached over, tilted her head to inspect her neck and grunted in satisfaction. Kalmár walked to the bell pull and rang. He was sitting in his chair and reading the abandoned newspaper when Wolfie appeared.

He peered over his glasses, “Ms Johnson will need food and water shortly.”

“How is she?” Wolfie sounded hesitant.

“Much as expected.” Kalmár went back to his paper, once more the picture of elegance and decaying wealth.

Amazon.com | Amazon UK

About Erme Lander:

More frog than princess, Erme Lander lives in Gloucestershire, England.

My hobbies when not reading books are dancing, motorcycling, playing my accordion and karate, although not all at the same time. And daydreaming. I’ll daydream in the bath, on the sofa, in bed at that time in the night when all decent folk are snoring and allow the images to pass over my brain. But I’ve never actually written them down, until last year when a certain vampire wouldn’t leave me in peace. I’m still dealing with the fallout...

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