Today I have a guest post from Lindsey Duncan, fellow Grimbold Books author! Take it away, Lindsey...
Thanks to Jennifer for having me on her blog to talk about my recent science fiction release, Scylla and Charybdis! Here's the novel's blurb:
Anaea Carlisle, raised on an isolated space station populated solely by women, believes the rest of the universe has been plunged into anarchy and ruin by an alien-engineered disease known as Y-Poisoning. On a salvage mission, she helps rescue a hypermental named Gwydion who challenges everything she thought she knew.
Forced to flee the station with Gwydion, Anaea finds herself in an inexplicable, often hostile world, permanently divided between the Galactic Collective and the Pinnacle Empire. She longs for some place to call home, but first, she’ll have to survive …
Forced to flee the station with Gwydion, Anaea finds herself in an inexplicable, often hostile world, permanently divided between the Galactic Collective and the Pinnacle Empire. She longs for some place to call home, but first, she’ll have to survive …
Writing a science fiction novel was a departure for me. I'm a fantasy writer at heart, favoring secondary world fantasy - stories in an invented, non-Earth setting. Worldbuilding is one of my passions. I adore creating settings in far more detail than they ever appear in the book, but it's not wasted work: the act of building helps develop the story in my subconscious. Often, I'll find that a nuance or minor element I put into the worldbuilding to entertain myself will prove important to the story.
That happened with Scylla and Charybdis, specifically the flora and fauna. I spent a lot of time developing the populated planets in that universe, including the native creatures. I wanted to avoid the trap of making the animals look like hybrids of Earth animals, but I also figured that people build metaphors and draw comparisons from what they know. Any new species they encountered was going to be described in context of Earth zoology, at least in the early days of colonization.
I also knew that it was a mistake to assume that the chemistry and biology of plants from other planets would be compatible with human physiology. I came up with a handful of alien flora that I decided would be edible, one of which makes a direct appearance in the novel as a bonding experience. No matter how different their upbringing, everyone has to eat. (At least, they do in this science fiction setting …)
Back to the fauna part of the equation. With the justifications above, I came up with raptorhounds, which are best described as sabre-toothed canids. Native to the planet of Independence, they were the apex predators before human settlement and proved impossible to domesticate. With the typical charm of humanity, the later government came up with a means to use them for spectator sport: bloodthirsty, dangerous and lucrative.
Thrust into a high society party as an informant, Anaea finds herself comforted with another alien species: mindfire worms, a hallucinogenic delicacy that, if handled incorrectly, bores through the back of the mouth and starts to eat the brain. I had Japanese fugu in mind when I came up with these creatures, but in this case, survival depends not on the chef’s expertise but on the diner’s.
A final creature that shows up in the pages of Scylla and Charybdis isn’t alien at all, but rather a genetic hybrid: a kearl, part monkey, part cat. Kearls are designed as companion animals, modified to be sensitive to moods and with instinctive soothing behaviors. But they were never intended for the kind of adventure Anaea ends up dragging Penelope into …
Check Scylla and Charybdis out at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/
LINDSEY DUNCAN is a chef / pastry chef, professional Celtic harp performer and life-long writer, with short fiction and poetry in numerous speculative fiction publications. Her contemporary fantasy novel, Flow, is available from Double Dragon Publishing, and her soft science novel, Scylla and Charybdis, is now out from Grimbold Books. She feels that music and language are inextricably linked. She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio and can be found on the web at http://www.LindseyDuncan.com and http://lindseyduncan.blogspot.
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