“Beneath everything, the Dark Mother stirs once more. And when she rises, she will rise in blood.” We talked to debut author Bryan Wigmore about his fantasy novel, The Goddess Project, Book 1 of the Fire Stealers sequence (Snowbooks, 2017).
Bryan, welcome to SFF World. Could you tell us a little about The Goddess Project?
It’s an adventure story revolving around Orc and Cass, two freedivers whose memories have been blocked, and who can’t act on their attraction for each other because of a horrible suspicion they might be brother and sister. Their desperation to uncover the truth entangles them in an occult conspiracy on a mysterious island, with increasingly dangerous consequences for themselves and the world. One advance review summed it up: ‘It’s like His Dark Materials grew up and ran away to sea,’ which I like.
The setting to your story is an interesting mixture of modern and quasi-Victorian, with lashings of several cultures and eras. It feels familiar and yet unique. What were some of the main inspirations for your world?
The familiarity with our own world was deliberate, whereas any feeling of uniqueness probably comes from a few fundamental decisions I made about the nature of my world and its ancient past – some of these come to light in this book and some only much later. What also might feel different about the setting is that although technology and some social aspects resemble those of our world of about 1900, the majority of The Goddess Project doesn’t take place in an analogue of late-Victorian England, but somewhere more like the Mediterranean. I chose this partly to avoid the well-trodden path of steampunk, and partly because I wanted the region to be the past site of a particular kind of civilisation that would have needed warmer climes to flourish. Also, the sea had to be warm enough for freediving!
The Goddess Project is packed full of small clues that will eventually lead to a bigger picture later in the series. And yet it doesn’t feel maddeningly frustrating, more like a picture that comes slowly into focus. How hard was it to find a balance between giving readers too much information and too little?
I wasn’t often aware of striking a balance, though I don’t know how much tightrope-walking was done in my subconscious. I dislike characters artificially withholding information from the reader, so in my stories if a character knows something and has a credible reason to reveal it, they tend to. It also helped that I wanted to have each of the books largely self-contained, with progress also being made in the overarching story, meaning that there were certain questions I had to answer before the end of The Goddess Project. My attitude is that apart from a few key mysteries, there’s little point holding much back anyway, because questions are like the hydra’s heads – get rid of one, and two more grow in its place. And if you delay too many answers for too long, you have an ending that’s nothing but exposition.
One of my favorite things about this book are the animaths known as the Fire Stealers, in particular Otter. Could you tell us more about your animal ‘spirit guides’?
The Fire Stealers are six creatures bound by a legend in which they team up (or are co-opted by their ‘leader’, Raven) to steal fire at the dawn of time and give it to the first people, thus lifting humankind above the animals. Now they act as shamanic power animals (called ‘animaths’ in my world). Otter appears early on as Orc’s animath, but Orc isn’t the only person to be bonded with a Fire Stealer, as he later discovers.
Otter is one of my favorite characters. He even has his own Twitter account! (@fire_stealer) Does he sit on your shoulder and boss you around while you write?
Yes, one of my most common experiences when writing are the words “I could be in this scene!” together with a waft of fish-breath. He can be lazy on Twitter because of the amount of time he spends snoozing, but when prodded awake he likes to show off his ‘wisdom’.
One of the central themes of The Goddess Project is identity, with main characters Orc and Cass searching for their lost memories and their place in the world. The theme is repeated with other characters, such as Hana. Was this something you set out to work with from the start, or did the theme emerge as you wrote?
I think I’d struggle to write a main character that didn’t have some kind of identity issue. The best I can hope for is that they’re not all the same! Personal, social and cultural identity, the search for one’s true place in the world (if such a thing even exists) is something that’s always fascinated me, and I think it’s rarely been more relevant to our world than now. In the Fire Stealers sequence it also ties in with the larger-world theme concerning the development of individualism. A crucial point in my world’s history came when people began to see themselves not primarily as indivisible parts of the world and of Nature, but as self-contained individuals – this is part of the symbolic nature of the fire that Raven and his gang steal. And the idea of the Self is one of the preoccupations of Tashi, who starts off the story thinking he knows exactly his true place in the world, only to find himself ripped from it and forced to question it.
Your world is rich with different religions and beliefs. How did you work on this aspect of your story?
I’ve long found spiritual belief and religion interesting, partly because of the way it interacts with individual identity. My rather chaotic ideas and perceptions cohered a few years ago when I read Ken Wilber’s Up From Eden, in which he correlates the development of spiritual belief throughout (pre)history with the development of the individual psyche we all go through in childhood and adolescence. The part of this arc which shifts from mother earth-goddess to a father sky-god, and the corresponding part of the individual development of the ego, is fundamental to my series and its story-world. One of the things I wanted to do was to exaggerate the split between ideas of the female divine and the male divine, to utterly polarize them and see if this threw any light on certain aspects of our own society.
In your book, Orc and Cass are freedivers – an unusual occupation for fantasy characters. Why diving? And how did you research this aspect of your story?
I freedive myself, so although I’ve never got into the terrible situations Orc and Cass do, I didn’t have to research the experience of diving deep underwater on a held breath, how it feels and the techniques used. Why include it? Partly because I hadn’t seen it done in sci-fi or fantasy, and as a freediver that struck me as a missed opportunity. I wanted to communicate the joy and magic of that experience when it goes well, and I thought it had great dramatic potential if it went badly. To explore ancient ruins in an alien element, whether outer space or underwater, seems almost the epitome of fantasy adventure. The underwater parts of Tomb Raider were always my favourites.
Just for fun: if you could pick your own animath, what would it be? And why?
It would have to be Otter – and not just because of the grief I’d get from saying anything else! Otherwise, of the six Fire Stealers, I think Raven – he’d force me to keep my wits about me. Outside of those, maybe a hooded cobra, a speaker of venomous riddles that hide profound truths. But that one might be pre-empting the later books.
What are you working on right now? And what can we look forward to in Book 2?
I’m close to finishing Book 2, The Empyreus Proof, in which the action moves inland and northwards as the characters try to save themselves and unmask a conspiracy they believe holds the world enslaved to a falsehood. Some of the consequences of the magical events in The Goddess Project also begin to be played out on a larger stage. At least one new Fire Stealer appears, and it looks as if all six might be being drawn back together – but for what hidden purpose…?
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Interview by Juliana Spink Mills – SFFWorld.com © 2017
