New Book Spotlight
Sargassa
A mini-interview with Sophie Burnham
Tell us about your new book?
Sargassa is part political thriller, part coming of age story, and the first in a trilogy taking place in the modern day North America of a Roman Empire that never fell, but instead colonized half the globe.
This is a genre-bending speculative fiction epic with an ensemble cast of chaotic disaster queers who are (for the most part) doing their best. It’s the sprawling story of an empire on the brink, told through close and intertwining personal narrative, because the personal is political. It asks thorny, complicated questions while making space for young adults to be imperfect and messy.
What aspect of the book was the most fun to write?
The worldbuilding! I set a seemingly impossible task for myself, creating an alternate history divergence point so far in the past, but ultimately that ended up being a blessing in disguise. While I still had to do a lot of research, it meant that I was significantly less beholden to real-world history than I would have been if the divergence point occurred in the 19th century, for example. So instead it became a thought exercise—“What would the world look like today if the dominant global political framework were one of empire that grew directly out of antiquity? How do the threads of that society change over millennia and across oceans?” (Spoiler alert: It’s really not that different from current democracy. They just say the quiet part out loud.)
The details of worldbuilding are always fun because you’re taking given circumstances and marrying them with thematic relevance. How do people dress? Well, here are the materials that would be available to them and theoretically you could do anything with that, but what’s going to say something about the story? One answer to that question that became central to the book is the deeply stratified social caste system. Maybe it’s macabre to call that fun to write, but it infects every relationship in the book. Every character is highly aware of that man-made power and status at work conflicting with the organic relationships happening in spite of them. I’m really drawn to writing those kinds of tensions, which very much exist in the real world.
If there is one emotion or theme that you would hope that the reader connects with, what would that be?
I think ‘hopepunk’ is probably too expansive to be a genre definer, but it describes my work and this book in particular pretty well. Things can get incredibly grim, but at the end of the day it’s always about practical optimism and fearless creativity in the face of that bleakness. I hope that readers connect with that, and can bring it with them back into the polycrisis of our current reality. We all need to face hard truths right now, because until we do there’s no way to be practical, creative, and hopeful about solutions.