New Book Spotlight
Disquiet Gods
A mini-interview with Christopher Ruocchio
Tell us about your new book?
Disquiet Gods is the sixth book in my Sun Eater series, a space opera in the tradition of Star Wars or Frank Herbert’s Dune. The series is set 20,000 years into our future, in an age when mankind has settled a huge chunk of our galaxy, and in doing so has run afoul of a marauding alien race called the Cielcin. The story follows Hadrian Marlowe, a hero of the war between mankind and the Cielcin, as he recounts his life story. He tells us on page one that he is the man who ended the war and destroyed the Cielcin, and the rest of the story is why and how and about all the things that didn’t make it into the official history books.
Book 6 picks up with Hadrian in a very low place. He’s lost almost everything, and is living in exile beyond the borders of the human empire, the guest of a foreign prince. An exile. Despite the enmity between him and man’s emperor, he receives a pardon and a plea from said emperor himself, and is forced to re-enter the fray for what he believes will be one last mission: to slay one of the Watchers, one of the eldritch gods that may have been responsible for the creation of the universe itself.
What aspect of the book was the most fun to write?
This was honestly the hardest book of my career so far, and so “fun” might be better defined as “most rewarding,” and for me that’s some of the big thematic stuff. The series deals a lot with the problem of evil and why suffering exists at all, and there are passages that took me literal months to nail down, but the reader response to those passages has been mostly very positive. The truth is, I feel quite negatively about my work until I hear from my readers, and just seeing the effort pay off in the hearts and minds of other people is the most rewarding. But there’s also two major battle sequences in the book that I think are both some of my best. I love a good battle scene, man. Beyond that, Hadrian has also become a father in this book. He became a father slightly before I did myself (I actually got the cover art for this one on the day of my daughter’s birth, which was very special), and so this book will always hold a special place in my heart, as it gave me an excuse to think about fatherhood right as I became one, to really drill down and think about what that’d be like.
If there is one emotion or theme that you would hope that the reader connects with, what would that be?
You know, I really think it might be that bit about the reality of suffering I just mentioned. Someone asked me on an interview recently why tragedy seems to resonate better than comedy, and why it has more staying power. I didn’t have a great answer, but I said my guess was that the issue with comedy is that for a story to end happily, it must end before “ever after.” The traditional comedy ends with a wedding, whereas the tradition tragedy ends with a death—and we all die eventually. We all know that, even if we try to ignore that reality. Hadrian faces a lot of suffering, a lot of tragedy, as his story progresses. Things get very bleak, but he keeps fighting, he keeps insisting on the meaningfulness of life and action, and I think that resonates with people. It certainly resonates for me.
