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WORK TITLE: Quietus
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.tristanpalmgren.com/
CITY: Columbia
STATE: MO
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Bowling Green State University, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Has also worked variously as a coroner’s assistant, retail manager, cashier, university lecturer, factory technician, and clerk.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Tristan Palmgren is a writer of works in the science fiction genre. He holds a master’s degree from Bowling Green State University. Palmgren has worked variously as a coroner’s assistant, retail manager, cashier, university lecturer, factory technician, and clerk.
In 2018, he released his first novel, Quietus. In an interview with a contributor to the My Life, My Books, My Escape website, Palmgren explained: “Quietus is a science fiction novel set during the Black Death, about a transdimensional anthropologist, a Carthusian monk, the weight of loss, and compassion in impossible circumstances.” He added: “Quietus is split between worlds. It takes place predominantly in medieval Europe, and especially in Italy. It traces the path of the Black Death as it spreads through cities like Messina, Genoa, Venice, Avignon, Marseilles, and in between and beyond. Dr. Habidah Shen and her team have come to study these people and their many ways of reacting to the plague. They’re from a multiverse-spanning empire called the Unity. The Unity is as diverse as it is large, with as many ways of life as worlds, bound and woven together by an alliance of AIs.” Other characters in the book include a Carthusian monk named Niccoluccio and Meloku, Habidah’s nemesis.
Regarding the choice of book’s title, Palmgren told a writer on the Qwillery website: “Quietus is a nice, underused word with some heft to it. It makes me think of not only death, but release and repose. I could think of no better single word to describe the feeling I wanted to write about.” In the same interview, he discussed the historical elements he used in connection with the character of Niccoluccio. He stated: “I decided on the Carthusian order for a few reasons. Niccoluccio’s historical model, Petrarch’s brother Gherardo, was a Carthusian. The pervasive silence of a Carthusian monastery, and the way silence makes all the little sounds of life more noticeable (and their absence especially so), was important to the way I thought the Black Death should manifest to his senses.” Palmgren told a contributor to the Strange Alliances website: “Writing about Niccolucio was one of my favourite parts of the book. For the details I am indebted to Julie Kerr’s book Life in the Medieval Cloister. I had it on the desk while I was writing Quietus because I referred to it so often. It is full of insights into the motives of why people went into monasteries and titbits about their lifestyle and their beliefs. Like Barbara Tuchman’s book, this was another very engaging detail-rich book that made me want to write something about a monk and his monastic life.” He added: “Historical fiction, historical nonfiction and space opera are my favourite genres. So, I wanted to mash them all together, because I’ve never seen that done before.” Palmgren also stated: “One of the generating ideas of this novel was foregrounding that bias that we carry on along with us into historical fiction and historical non-fiction. Meloku is a different form of that bias. It’s tempting for us to think of ourselves as above these historical characters and more all-knowing than the people in that era. I would be lying if I said I did not feel that way sometimes. I wanted to bring that feeling out into the open through Meloku, discuss it and have some fun with it.”
“Palmgren’s debut, a combination of speculative and historical fiction, will appeal to fans of Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book,” noted Lucy Lockley in Booklist. Paul Di Filippo, reviewer on the Locus website, asserted that Quietus “stands out as very distinctive and different and highly accomplished. This promising launch of Palmgren’s career should be heralded widely.” “Readers looking for something exciting from a promising new voice will find Palmgren’s debut worth their time,” suggested a critic on the Publishers Weekly website.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, March 1, 2018, Lucy Lockley, review of Quietus, p. 32.
ONLINE
Locus, https://locusmag.com/ (April 5, 2018), Paul Di Filippo, review of Quietus.
London Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (March 31, 2018), review of Quietus.
My Life, My Books, My Escape, https://mylifemybooksmyescape.wordpress.com/ (March 7, 2018), author interview.
Publishers Weekly Online, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (March, 2018), review of Quietus.
Qwillery, http://qwillery.blogspot.com/ (March 9, 2018), author interview.
Strange Alliances, https://strangealliances.wordpress.com/ (March 10, 2018), author interview.
Tristan Palmgren website, https://tristanpalmgren.com/ (August 7, 2018).
Tristan Palmgren
Do not look closely at the goofus, for the goofus also looks back unto you.
I am a currently working SF/F writer. I earned my MFA in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. In my various lives, I've worked as a clerk, a factory technician, a university lecturer, a cashier, a secretary, a retail manager, and coroner's assistant.
My debut novel QUIETUS, a genre-warping blend of historical fiction and space opera set during the Black Death, was published by Angry Robot Books March, 2018. The sequel TERMINUS will be coming out November, 2018.
I can be contacted by e-mail with the button below. You can also find me on Twitter @TristanPalmgren.
QUOTED: "Quietus is a science fiction novel set during the Black Death, about a transdimensional anthropologist, a Carthusian monk, the weight of loss, and compassion in impossible circumstances."
"Quietus is split between worlds. It takes place predominantly in medieval Europe, and especially in Italy. It traces the path of the Black Death as it spreads through cities like Messina, Genoa, Venice, Avignon, Marseilles, and in between and beyond. Dr. Habidah Shen and her team have come to study these people and their many ways of reacting to the plague. They’re from a multiverse-spanning empire called the Unity. The Unity is as diverse as it is large, with as many ways of life as worlds, bound and woven together by an alliance of AIs."
AUTHOR INTERVIEW: TRISTAN PALMGREN
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Today I am interviewing Tristan Palmgren, author of the new science-fiction novel, Quietus.
◊ ◊ ◊
DJ: Hi Tristan! Thanks for agreeing to do this interview!
For readers who aren’t familiar with you, could you tell us a little about yourself?
Tristan Palmgren: Hello, and thank you for having me!
I’ve been writing science fiction since grade school, and knew I wanted to keep writing. Unfortunately, that was about the only thing I knew about myself. In my other lives, I’ve been a teacher, a lecturer, a clerk, a technician, a secretary, a store manager, and a rural coroner’s assistant. Quietus is my debut novel.
DJ: What is Quietus about?
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Tristan: Quietus is a science fiction novel set during the Black Death, about a transdimensional anthropologist, a Carthusian monk, the weight of loss, and compassion in impossible circumstances.
DJ: What were some of your influences for Quietus?
Tristan: The research! It was in reading about the Black Death that I realized that I wanted to write about it. Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century does not dwell on the Black Death, but the pages it spends on plague were so evocative that I immediately started more research. Barbara Tuchman is a novelist’s historian, and I try to take lessons from her craft every time I read it. Julie Kerr’s Life in the Medieval Cloister helped me solidify Niccoluccio.
DJ: What is the world and setting of Quietus like?
Tristan: Quietus is split between worlds. It takes place predominantly in medieval Europe, and especially in Italy. It traces the path of the Black Death as it spreads through cities like Messina, Genoa, Venice, Avignon, Marseilles, and in between and beyond.
Dr Habidah Shen and her team have come to study these people and their many ways of reacting to the plague. They’re from a multiverse-spanning empire called the Unity. The Unity is as diverse as it is large, with as many ways of life as worlds, bound and woven together by an alliance of AIs.
The Unity might not be around for much longer. Like the people of Italy, it’s suffering through its own plague. There seems to be no stop to it, or quarantining of it. That’s why Habidah and her team have come to our world. They’re not searching for a cure to their plague. Rather, they’re studying how we reacted to so great a mortality, and searching for strategies to export back home. It’s been a long time since anyone in the Unity has had to deal with so mundane a thing as contagious disease.
DJ: Could you briefly tell us a little about your main characters? Do they have any cool quirks or habits, or any reason why readers with sympathize with them?
Tristan: Dr Habidah Shen suffers for her compassion. She constantly fights a humanitarian urge to intervene with the people on this world. She cannot remember the last time she cried, and she wishes she could start now.
Niccoluccio Caracciola is based on a real person: Petrarch’s brother Gherardo, whose story we know only from Petrarch’s letters. Gherardo was a Carthusian monk, and the only survivor of his monastery. He was left alone for months with only a dog as company.
Meloku, one of Habidah’s anthropologists, does not suffer Habidah’s humanitarian urges. Nor her compunctions against interfering. She has the power to bring this world crashing down upon itself, and intends to use it.
DJ: What was your favorite part about writing Quietus?
Tristan: The freedom science fiction gives me to write about historical events from a nakedly modern perspective. Habidah and her anthropologists, for all the alienness of their backgrounds, have a perspective on Niccoluccio’s history akin to our own. They’re scientifically knowledgeable. To them, Niccoluccio’s world is small and explicable in the smallest detail.
One of the limitations of reading historical fiction is that we can never divest ourselves of that perspective. Writing this novel gave me a chance to foreground that, and draw attention to the problems it causes. Habidah’s knowledge limits what she can see.
DJ: What do you think readers will be talking about most once they finish it?
Tristan: So far early reviews have all mentioned the novel’s pacing and dual identity. Quietus is both a contemplative historical novel and grand space opera. This might seem like an odd pairing, but they’re my two favorite genres to read–they’re my chocolate and my peanut butter. I love having both.
DJ: Did you have a particular goal when you began writing Quietus? Was there a particular message or meaning you are hoping to get across when readers finish it? Or is there perhaps a certain theme to the story?
Tristan: I’ve always been entranced by alternate history, but less recently by What-If scenarios, and more by alternate history’s power to make history seem alive. Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Years of Rice and Salt lit a fire under me. It’s easy to look ahead and see an array of possibilities. But when we look back, history starts to seem like just a linear sequence of events. It feels constrained. We can’t pretend that we don’t know the outcomes. Alternate history, speculative history, robs us of that certainty, and helps us understand the choices people made without the benefit of hindsight.
Quietus is not alternate history, or secret history, but it fits on the same shelf. I wanted readers to approach the Black Death without the certainty that hindsight brings. The certainties that Habidah and her anthropologists bring do not help them in the slightest.
DJ: When I read, I love to collect quotes – whether it be because they’re funny, foodie, or have a personal meaning to me. Do you have any favorite quotes from Quietus that you can share with us?
Tristan: Habidah and her team have come to study how these societies react and evolve to the Black Death. Some societies held together remarkably well… for what that was worth. This moment comes right out of the historical record:
“Courts were in session. Habidah listened in on one case, a nephew and a stepbrother disputing the inheritance of a small house. The previous owner had left a will, but all five other beneficiaries had died. When the court reconvened the next day, neither claimant arrived. Habidah tracked them down. They’d perished overnight.”
These paragraphs are Quietus in a nutshell:
“At the breakfast table, Dioneo’s surviving children couldn’t stop talking about something that had happened in the skies early this morning. They hadn’t seen it themselves, but they had heard the story from their housekeeper. Shortly after the last of the stars had disappeared, a white streak had ripped across the sky, as if the firmament could be split like the skin of a fruit.
By the time Niccoluccio had woken, it had long since disappeared. According to the people who had seen it, it had been like a comet’s tail. Comets always heralded disaster.
Dioneo’s children were struggling to determine what could be worse than the pestilence. Finally, they turned to Niccoluccio. ‘Is this the end of days, uncle?’ the oldest boy asked. He sounded as though he were asking if there would be fruit after breakfast.
‘Never believe that,’ Niccoluccio said.”
DJ: Now that Quietus is released, what is next for you?
Tristan: As of the time of this writing, what’s next is a secret. But there will be a “next.”
DJ: Where can readers find out more about you?
Tristan: I’m on Twitter at @TristanPalmgren, and my website is at tristanpalmgren.com. Both good places to find out what the aforementioned “next” will be, as well as make fun of me if you are so inclined.
DJ: Before we go, what is that one thing you’d like readers to know about Quietus that we haven’t talked about yet?
Tristan: Death is looming and it is coming for us all. The clock is always ticking, but the Reaper exempts time spent reading Quietus.
DJ: Is there anything else you would like add?
Tristan: I’ve had two of Quietus’s characters in my imagination for fourteen years. It’s an incredible pleasure to be able to share with readers.
DJ: Thank you so much for taking time out of your day to answer my questions!
Tristan: Thank you!
◊ ◊ ◊
QUOTED: "Quietus is a nice, underused word with some heft to it. It makes me think of not only death, but release and repose. I could think of no better single word to describe the feeling I wanted to write about."
"I decided on the Carthusian order for a few reasons. Niccoluccio's historical model, Petrarch's brother Gherardo, was a Carthusian. The pervasive silence of a Carthusian monastery, and the way silence makes all the little sounds of life more noticeable (and their absence especially so), was important to the way I thought the Black Death should manifest to his senses."
Friday, March 09, 2018
Interview with Tristan Palmgren, author of Quietus
Please welcome Tristan Palmgren to The Qwillery as part of the 2018 Debut Author Challenge Interviews. Quietus was published on March 6th by Angry Robot.
TQ: Welcome to The Qwillery. What is the first piece you remember writing?
Tristan: Hi! Thanks for having me! I'm sure I had written things before, but the first I can recall with any clarity was in fourth grade: a piece of Star Trek fanfiction in which I tried as hard as possible to mimic the books I'd read. Characters brooded! They thought in italics! I turned it in for an assignment, and can't remember what my teacher thought, but I was very excited.
TQ: Are you a plotter, a pantser or a hybrid?
Tristan: I outline my novels in excruciating detail, pay attention to that for the first few scenes, and then bin it.
It's telling that, for my current project, I wrote detailed notes for the first few scenes and then just stopped. I haven't missed them.
To date, I also have done most (not all) of my writing in pants.
TQ: What is the most challenging thing for you about writing?
Tristan: Maintaining focus and not drifting to other tasks. It's too easy to blame social media for this, but even before I became active on such terrible places as Twitter, I would stop writing in the middle of a paragraph or sentence and hop onto some blog or website that had popped into my head for no reason.
TQ: What has influenced / influences your writing?
Tristan: Kim Stanley Robinson's SF has a contemplative side I continually find mirrored in my own writing, whether I set out to do so or not. The Years of Rice and Salt lit a fire under me. It was the first alternate history I'd read that, rather than approach history as a puzzlebox seeking a new solution (not always bad!), was an intimate story about two characters. The speculative history was a means to better explore the ways in which people perceived and lived through ours.
There's more than a little Iain M. Banks in Quietus, from the headiness of his worldbuilding to the scale of his threats.
TQ: Describe Quietus in 140 characters or less.
Tristan: Quietus is a science fiction novel set during the Black Death about a transdimensional anthropologist, a Carthusian monk, and radical compassion in impossible circumstances.
TQ: Why the Latin title? One of your characters, Niccoluccio, is a Carthusian monk. Why did you choose the Carthusian Order for Niccoluccio?
Tristan: Quietus is a nice, underused word with some heft to it. It makes me think of not only death, but release and repose. I could think of no better single word to describe the feeling I wanted to write about.
I decided on the Carthusian order for a few reasons. Niccoluccio's historical model, Petrarch's brother Gherardo, was a Carthusian. The pervasive silence of a Carthusian monastery, and the way silence makes all the little sounds of life more noticeable (and their absence especially so), was important to the way I thought the Black Death should manifest to his senses.
The Carthusians are also relatively more severe than other orders. I did not want Niccoluccio to have an easy time when he joined. He needed to have wanted it, and demonstrably so.
TQ: Tell us something about Quietus that is not found in the book description.
Tristan: Many of its descriptions, thoughts, and terror of death came from my experiences working as a coroner's assistant.
The worst of those, though, came from the same place as everybody else's: staring at the ceiling at night, sleepless.
TQ: What inspired you to write Quietus? What appeals to you about writing SF?
Tristan: Reading Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century. There are only a few chapters on the Black Death, but they were written with such striking detail that I could not get them out of my head. That started a long road of research. Barbara Tuchman is a novelist's historian, and I try to take as many lessons from her craft as I can.
SF bends the real just enough to make our world seem just as alien as it actually is.
TQ: What sort of research did you do for Quietus?
Tristan: Books, books, books. Western State Colorado University's library was especially helpful here. Julie Kerr's Life in the Medieval Cloister is a good place to anyone curious about medieval monastic life to start reading.
TQ: Please tell us about the cover for Quietus.
Tristan: The cover depicts a scene very early in Quietus, so no real spoiler! The anthropologist Dr. Habidah Shen has just left plague-ravaged Messina, and is waiting for her team's shuttle to pick her up. The shuttle has a modest camouflage ability. It seeps out of the clouds more than it descends from them.
The art is by the wonderful Dominic Harman, who you can find at http://dominicharman.blogspot.com/.
TQ: In Quietus who was the easiest character to write and why? The hardest and why?
Tristan: I thought Niccoluccio would be my biggest challenge, as there were so many details about monastic life that I felt I had to get right. The anthropologists, though they come from a different universe, were deliberately given a "modern" perspective, and so I thought their voices would come a little more easily. But Niccoluccio and I turned out to be after broadly the same things in life.
The most challenging character to write for was one of the anthropologists on Habidah's team, Meloku. Meloku is the most alien of Quietus's viewpoint characters. She's been living with an AI companion inside her head for years, embedded in her thoughts, and that's shaped her in all the worst ways you can imagine. She's not cruel, but she is cold in a way that I found difficult to write while maintaining reasons to care about her.
The key to unlocking her turned out to be her anger. She's a very angry person, though she does not acknowledge that. She has fair reason to be angry.
TQ: Which question about Quietus do you wish someone would ask? Ask it and answer it!
Tristan:
Q: Will the dog be all right?
A: The dog will be all right in the end.
TQ: Give us one or two of your favorite non-spoilery quotes from Quietus.
Tristan: "Courts were in session. Habidah listened in on one case, a nephew and a stepbrother disputing the inheritance of a small house. The previous owner had left a will, but all five other beneficiaries had died. When the court reconvened the next day, neither claimant arrived. Habidah tracked them down. They'd perished overnight."
TQ: What's next?
Tristan: It's a secret--for now. But there will be a "next."
TQ: Thank you for joining us at The Qwillery.
Tristan: Thank you!
QUOTED: "Writing about Niccolucio was one of my favourite parts of the book. For the details I am indebted to Julie Kerr’s book Life in the Medieval Cloister. I had it on the desk while I was writing Quietus because I referred to it so often. It is full of insights into the motives of why people went into monasteries and titbits about their lifestyle and their beliefs. Like Barbara Tuchman’s book, this was another very engaging detail-rich book that made me want to write something about a monk and his monastic life."
"Historical fiction, historical non-fiction and space opera are my favourite genres. So, I wanted to mash them all together, because I’ve never seen that done before."
"One of the generating ideas of this novel was foregrounding that bias that we carry on along with us into historical fiction and historical non-fiction. Meloku is a different form of that bias. It’s tempting for us to think of ourselves as above these historical characters and more all-knowing than the people in that era. I would be lying if I said I did not feel that way sometimes. I wanted to bring that feeling out into the open through Meloku, discuss it and have some fun with it."
Tristan Palmgren. When history and space opera combine.
March 10, 2018
Quietus book cover
Quietus is a book which covers a great deal of ground in terms of history, action and different people’s philosophical standpoints and emotions. The does not give the impression of having been dashed off overnight, but something a great deal more considered. What is particularly interesting is the blending of historical novel with “right out there” space opera. Given that Tristan Palmgren is neither a historian nor a scientist, I wanted to understand how a writer can get to grips with such an extensive palette of ideas and craft a highly readable and absorbing novel out of them.
I would like you to tell me about your writing journey.
I’ve been writing since middle school. I started writing fan fiction when I was in fourth grade and never stopped. I did attempt to write a full novel later on in middle school, but only succeeded in finishing a novel in high school, which wasn’t very good. But it was finished and I could keep working on it. I’ve had about ten different manuscripts since then in various states of completion. None of which had seen the light of day until Quietus. So, I reached well over a million words of junk until I reached something publishable.
It’s interesting that you managed to finish a novel at such an early age.
Finishing at that age is very different to what I count as finishing now. Finishing then was about getting a big pile of words and hitting the word count. Finishing now is not only about getting that first draft done, but also about revising.
How do you know what you need to do to revise your manuscript?
I’ve had about ten different manuscripts before this. By the time I got to Quietus I had figured out pretty much what I needed to do with it. My usual habit after finishing a draft is to leave it alone for a few months, if I can, and come back to it going line by line through it at least three to four times and then some more, if I feel like I need it or if someone else tells me I need it.
I’m still reading bits in Quietus I would go back and change if I could. But what makes a manuscript done is when it’s sent off ready for review. The problem if I am left too long with a manuscript is that I will continue to tinker with it until it’s basically unrecognisable. At some point it feels good enough to send off for someone to look at.
Have you always written in this type of genre? You talked about fan fiction. What genre was this in?
It was science fiction. I almost always wrote science fiction to begin with. Branching into history is something a little more recent for me. I only started it three to four failed manuscripts ago.
My interest in writing history started with fantasy and realising just how much I would learn from researching history and figuring out the type of fantasy I wanted. This is when I decided to bring the real world into my fantasy writing.
Your day job is not as a historian and is very different to that of being an author or an academic. I would like you to talk about how you do your research, because there will be a lot of people out there wanting to add a historical element to their story, but not sure how to go about it.
The closest thing to an academic background in history that I have is as a history minor as an undergraduate. It was only a few classes, so nothing heavy.
I read a lot of history non-fiction for pleasure. That’s how Quietus began. I was reading one of my favourite historians Barbara Tuchman’s book Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century. She is a novelist’s historian. She excels at drawing scenes and characters. That book in particular was the history of the fourteen century as told through the life of Enguerrand de Coucy. There were only a few chapters in the book about the Black Death. Most of the Black Death occurred in de Coucy’s parents’ generation rather than his own, but those parts of it were drawn so well and so grippingly that I wanted to research more and find out more about it.
I’ve been lucky enough to have access to a university library wherever I’ve lived, in addition to books I’ve been able to buy and borrow from community libraries. I wouldn’t call what I do academic-quality research, but I’ve been able to find a fair bit of fun, usable material.
You talk about being able to read details in these types of history books and how approachable these books are to a non-academic writer, despite being non-fiction, because they have been written in a story-like manner, rather than dry facts.
That’s why I describe Barbara Tuchman as a novelist’s historian and how her style of writing made it very easy to generate a story.
How do you do your research and pull it all together?
I have big files of notes and quotes. I think my file for Quietus was about 15000 words of random snippets of things I collected during the course of my reading. I used only a fraction of the three or so months’ research I did for my novel. But I’m really happy that I took the time to do that.
How organised are you, in that can you quickly find the different bits of information you need? There’s nothing worse than knowing something might be relevant for your work, but you can’t find it.
I have different files of notes focused on different subjects. For example, I have a file focused on the Black Death and another focused on general lifestyle. I also have a file of quotes in a file on the fourteenth century that’s about life in a monastery. The find function on most word processing software is very helpful for finding details.
Niccolucio, the monk, is a very interesting and appropriate character because of the way he fitted into the developing storyline. I got the sense that Niccolucio may have been the driving force behind the creation of the novel.
He popped up first. He actually has a real-life counterpart of brother Gherardo who was also a Carthusian monk. He was the sole survivor of his monastery. He was alone in the monastery for several months during a hard winter with only his dogs for company. Obviously, his life then took a different course to Niccolucio’s, but he immediately stood out to me the moment I read his story and I knew I wanted to include that story in my writing.
What I felt was so intriguing and made me so immersed in Niccolucio’s life were the details of his world and how his story eventually developed. I also got the impression you really enjoyed writing about him.
Yes. Writing about Niccolucio was one of my favourite parts of the book. For the details I am indebted to Julie Kerr’s book Life in the Medieval Cloister. I had it on the desk while I was writing Quietus because I referred to it so often. It is full of insights into the motives of why people went into monasteries and titbits about their lifestyle and their beliefs. Like Barbara Tuchman’s book, this was another very engaging detail-rich book that made me want to write something about a monk and his monastic life.
Bringing what is essentially a historical novel together with a space opera struck me as a rather daunting task, because finding appropriate points at which to join them without it seeming to be contrived was asking a lot of a debut novelist.
Historical fiction, historical non-fiction and space opera are my favourite genres. So, I wanted to mash them all together, because I’ve never seen that done before.
I wrote everything broadly in the order in which it appeared in the novel. I may have juggled something around, but I wrote Niccolucio’s sections at the same time as I was writing Habidah’s (the transdimensional anthropologist) and going backwards and forwards between them.
My outlining process might be a little unusual because I write it in excruciating detail, scene by scene, listing what I want to happen in that scene and how I want the characters to feel. I pay close attention to them for the first few scenes that I write and then abandon it once I’m a few scenes in. I don’t refer to it from then on because I’ve got into the writing. I effectively use the outline to kickstart things and grease the wheels, but not beyond that.
Would you describe how you managed to bring the historical part with the space opera?
Although I do like reading historical non-fiction, for me to approach my writing purely from the viewpoint of a historical novel can be a problem for me because it’s like watching a prequel. By the time you get to the main part of the novel you know what has already happened and you know things that the characters don’t know, not just about events, but also how their world has worked. Moments of dramatic tension might become moments of dramatic irony in historical fiction because, as readers in the future, we already know the outcome and we can’t eliminate that knowledge.
What I wanted to do with Quietus was foreground that bias and that perspective and give it a voice in Habidah. My initial conception for the novel was that Habidah and her team of anthropologists would come from a background much more similar to our own. Near distant future, rather than far flung space empire in the future, just to give them a voice that was more modern. They still do have that modern perspective on Niccolucio’s world and Habiah is aware of her biases and how that prevents her from understanding Niccolucio’s world. She tries repeatedly to get herself into it by viewing the world without the benefit of her retinal infrared and all of the extra sensors that she has by virtue of coming from a far-flung, transdimensional space empire. She’s not quite able to do that until she needs Niccolucio. She is coming at the world of the fourteenth century from a different perspective to Niccolucio and in a way which reflects my own reading of history. This was one of the reasons why I wanted to write this novel.
I think Niccolucio’s vocation and natural disposition was an excellent choice with regards to how he came to terms with his exposure to the type of technology that would be mind-blowing, even for us.
Niccolucio’s adjustment to Habidah’s world was one of my favourite moments in the writing process of Quietus. He comes from a solitary, almost academic background. He’s spent a lot of time in his head and is therefore more willing than a lot of other people would be to accept what he sees as miracles without standing agog, rending his shirt and screaming into the heavens. This is something we’ve seen too many times and so I think it wouldn’t have been very interesting to read about. I wanted his transition in the things he was seeing and experiencing not only to feel fresh but to happen as quickly as possible.
There is probably a general awareness of a reader about The Plague, but not the details of the fourteenth century, which is very interesting. But there is a line between enabling the reader to become immersed in the historical setting and the plot beginning to drag because there is too much detail in the story.
When I’m writing a draft I don’t know when to stop. Eventually I had to look at what I needed to cut. With Quietus I ended up cutting out a lot from the first draft. For example, there was a long section about the nature of the Flemish cloth trade and how Flemish cloth was more desirable than other kinds of cloth, although it was often plainer, but it had a better texture. I’m the kind of person who gets excited about reading that type of detail, so I got carried away and had to eventually cut it down to the word “Flemish”.
So, in the first draft I just get on with the process of getting words down and then deal with it in the edits where I’m approaching it from a more distant, reader’s perspective. Adopting this perspective means I have a better sense of what’s engaging and what I really need.
Habidah’s nemesis Meloku was another interesting character. She is incredibly manipulative and a real villain on behalf of her masters.
I had real fun with Meloku. One of the generating ideas of this novel was foregrounding that bias that we carry on along with us into historical fiction and historical non-fiction. Meloku is a different form of that bias. It’s tempting for us to think of ourselves as above these historical characters and more all-knowing than the people in that era. I would be lying if I said I did not feel that way sometimes. I wanted to bring that feeling out into the open through Meloku, discuss it and have some fun with it.
Was the space opera part of the book challenging to write because the network and alliances of ruling races is so vast and complex?
It was a challenge, because most of the novel takes place on Medieval earth and Europe, so I didn’t have much chance to show the Unity space empire. I took what chances I could to grab it and to show it. There’s an extended sequence in the novel where Habidah slips into a data stream and witnesses what is going on back in the Unity. She sees not only her own worlds, but also the worlds her colleagues came from and what is going on in them.
I used this section to explore the Unity and the stakes of that conflict to make it clearer to readers, but at the same time wanted to keep the rest of the story grounded in Medieval Europe.
I am working on expanding the universe. The setting has a lot of potential.
QUOTED: "Palmgren's debut, a combination of speculative and historical fiction, will appeal to fans of Connie Willis' Doomsday Book."
Quietus
Lucy Lockley
Booklist. 114.13 (Mar. 1, 2018): p32.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Quietus. By Tristan Palmgren. Mar. 2018. 512p. Angry Robot, paper, $12.99 (9780857667434).
Deadly plagues are decimating two civilizations! Dr. Habidah Shen and her team of anthropologists have been assigned to a small but populous world to document the progress of a virulent epidemic. They watch and record data but never intervene. The researchers come from the Unity, a technologically advanced multiverse controlled by Amalgamants--complex, coldhearted AIs. The AIs seek answers for restraining a microbial scourge of unknown origin that is affecting almost all members of their domain. Shen breaks the no-interference protocol when she rescues a humble monk--a native who miraculously survived the pestilence--from a wolf attack. She does so to assuage her conscience--the AIs could easily cure the earthly disease if they wished. Simultaneously, another team member has deliberately become involved in local politics and the religious power structure. Is her colleague following a personal agenda or another assignment? Could the Amalgamants have an alternative goal, one detrimental to the people of this world? Palmgren's debut, a combination of speculative and historical fiction, will appeal to fans of Connie Willis' Doomsday Book (1992).--Lucy Lockley
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Lockley, Lucy. "Quietus." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2018, p. 32. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532250887/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3fb561a2. Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532250887
QUOTED: "stands out as very distinctive and different and highly accomplished. This promising launch of Palmgren’s career should be heralded widely."
Paul Di Filippo reviews Quietus by Tristan Palmgren
April 5, 2018 Paul Di Filippo
Quietus, by Tristan Palmgren (Angry Robot 978-0857667434, $12.99, 464pp, trade paperback) March 2018
Locus Magazine, Science Fiction FantasyHidden spies from a high-tech culture inserted into the primitive polity of fellow humans in order to gather data, while obedient to a clause not to interfere. Oh, we must be talking about one of Connie Willis’s time-travel novels, or perhaps an installment of Kage Baker’s Company franchise. Maybe even The Man Who Fell to Earth. But–surprise!–we are not. Instead we are looking at the debut novel from Tristan Palmgren, a book that might share a few conceptual elements employed by Willis and Baker (and others, extending back at least as far as Leiber’s Change War tales) but which nonetheless stands out as very distinctive and different and highly accomplished. This promising launch of Palmgren’s career should be heralded widely.
Here’s the basic setup. There is a vast organization dubbed the Unity. It extends not up and down a single timeline, but across the multiverse, taking in millions of “planes.” (And here we detect echoes from all those great multiversal sagas such as Keith Laumer’s Worlds of the Imperium and, more recently, Ian McDonald’s Everness series and the Baxter and Pratchett Long Earth saga.) The Unity is run by “amalgamates,” the only unfettered artificial intelligences around. Other AIs are “neutered” to lesser capacities: NAIs. Humans, while far from the only sentient species in this crosstime vastness, are a favored partner and tool of the amalgamates. The whole empire has been fine-tuned–“The amalgamates had conquered threats before… Other trans-planar empires. World-eater AIs. Memetic parasites. Plane-leaping vacuum metastability events.”–and is running swell. Or it would be if not for the advent of the oneirophage, a kind of brain-eating metaphysical ailment which even the amalgamates cannot handle.
Looking to understand the societal protocols of past plagues as a kind of anti-panic measure, the Unity has sent a mission to one version of Earth that is still living out the infamous medieval Black Plague. The mission consists of five individuals. Habidah, our main viewpoint character; Feliks, Joao, Kacienta and Meloku (also given her own intermittent chapters of narration). Disguised as typical citizens of the 1400s, operating from a subterranean base, they circulate among the unsuspecting natives, mostly in Italy. And during her pursuit of knowledge, Habidah will encounter a youngish monk named Niccolucio. Finding him on the point of death, she violates her mandate and brings him back to the base. Healing him, she also shares some of the realities of the Unity with him, then sends him off to Florence to help in the program of collecting data. She even gets retroactive approval from her superiors back in the Unity.
But then, everything goes kerflooey. A vast interstellar warship, the Ways and Means, hosting one of the amalgamates onboard, transits over to this plane for reasons unknown, manifesting in orbit around Earth. Suddenly the spies are involved in much larger and consequential doings, and Niccolucio proves to be a much more potent player than ever suspected.
Palmgren’s virtues as a writer are evident from page one. First off, he creates a cast of utterly rounded characters, Habidah first and foremost. Her reluctance ever to return to her home is just one of the engaging tidbits about her. These ultra-sophisticated, nearly posthuman Unity folks (they are laced with “demiorganic” implants and ridealong NAIs) are the endpoint essences of thousands of years of culture. (The Unity has been around for fifteen millennia.) Yet their motives and emotions remain relatable. Niccolucio and his fellow natives exhibit a completely believable mentality for this historical 1400s as we know that era. And when you put the two types together, the cognitive dissonance is enchanting.
As for the rich setting: not to spoil anything, I hope, but I can say that over eighty percent of the book takes place on the planet, and thus we are almost reading a historical novel insofar as Palmgren seeks to recreates this period. And indeed, he succeeds with gusto. From the misery and stinks to the faith and art, he conjures up a vivid representation. (A subplot involving the Avignon papacy and Meloku is intriguing.) When the book does shift to a more high-tech venue, the author unleashes a gosh-wow torrent of van-Vogtian superscience and enigmatic strategies. This is the kind of pure quill stefnal pyrotechnics which John C. Wright–no matter what you think of his politics–nailed so precisely and in twenty-first-century fashion.
The battle had taken place in a flash of milliseconds, before she realized it had started. The amalgamate had cut power to this chamber, an emergency attempt to stem the tide of data flowing out of Nicclucio’s mind.
And Palmgren doesn’t play for small stakes either. The book’s climax kicks the game board to the floor–in preparation, one presumes, for volume two of the series, Terminus, which we are teased with at the close of the novel.
Tristan Palmgren’s first book proves that no SF “power chord” is ever fully exploited, so long as visionary new writers keep popping up in the multiverse.
Paul Di Filippo has been writing professionally for over thirty years, and has published almost that number of books. He lives in Providence, RI, with his mate of an even greater number of years, Deborah Newton.
QUOTED: "Readers looking for something exciting from a promising new voice will find Palmgren’s debut worth their time."
Quietus
Tristan Palmgren. Angry Robot, $12.99 trade paper (464p) ISBN 978-0-85766-743-4
Palmgren’s intriguing but convoluted debut, a mash-up of SF and historical fiction, features an anthropologist researching the black plague in hopes of saving her home world from a baffling epidemic. Anthropologist Dr. Habidah Um’brael Thayusene Shen is able to study among many worlds, or planes, across time and space, and her current project finds her in medieval Italy as the bubonic plague sweeps through the population. She’s instructed not to interfere; she can only observe how people respond to the spread of the disease. Her masters, the amalgamates, who began as AIs, are desperate to combat a plague spreading through the multiverse. When Habidah discovers a gravely wounded Carthusian monk, the lone survivor of his cloister, she breaks protocol and recruits him to help her observe the Florentines. Soon, she discovers a vast conspiracy among the amalgamates, forcing her to question everything she believes in. Habidah is an appealing, intelligent heroine, and the intricate story effectively tackles big themes such as free will and mortality, but Palmgren’s impeccably built, immersive setting of plague-era Italy is more accessible than the complex elements of the multiverse. Readers looking for something exciting from a promising new voice will find Palmgren’s debut worth their time. (Mar.)
Tristan Palmgren
The US writer burst on to the SF scene this year with a stunning novel about an extraterrestrial who has arrived in 14th-century Italy to study the black death. The juxtaposition of alien and human cultures at the heart of Quietu allows Palmgren to ask a host of knotty philosophical questions, as well as to tell an emotionally affecting story. The sequel, Terminus, is due out later this year.