1) There are important dimensions to Down By The River that require it to be understood in the context of the Heath Cycle, but most people still don’t know that exists. Can you briefly explain the Heath Cycle and DBTR’s place in it?
DBTR is one of five or six stores making up the Heath Cycle, a planned series of novels roughly split between a modern half and a far future half. DBTR is the first entry in the latter segment. All take place in the world of Heath, at different points in the history of the Ecumene - the Ecumene functioning as a backdrop that ties each story together, builds on a set of assumptions that more individual stories can stem from.
Each story is about a unique kind of contact with spirituality, in a world where spirit is a living and concrete thing. Heath is an alternate history sticking relatively close to our own, but one in which minor land deities exist and are entire fields of study in university. Where footage has been taken from heaven and hell, communication channels established. A setting that’s able to literalize and unite topics of faith and society, while still feeling normal, not fantastical, familiar but with more things in it. What does a normal life look like in a world like that, and how does a broader and very specific social order develop through it?
The first half of the Cycle is largely about that first question, focusing on more intimate, character driven dreamy stories, while the second half jumps into the other question and gets to be higher-level civilizational. The first half lets us see how the Ecumene operates in times like our own, but from a distance - everyday lives, old stories, very rare brushes with the bureaucracy. But the second half dives into it, unpacks the history of the first half, carries the half-seen structures there to their natural conclusions. I think how I handle protagonists is also a big part of the Cycle’s character. I like playing with roles that seem ominous and blatant at first - inquisitors and ravens, sacrificial shrine maidens, deranged eugenicist nobles - and then have that be a relatively mundane government job with little danger involved, unique rather than sinister, something you actually have to treat as work. It’s a fakeout, but it remains part of who they are - that persistent reminder that in a different world these structures would have been turned to different ends, ran as sour as they promise. But with Heath, there gets to be more of a blank-slate exploration of what these are, what they signify, and the eye-level experience of the people who make lives there.
2) In what sense is DBTR, and the Heath Cycle more generally, meant to be read as utopian? Tonally it is far more so than most of the works in Holohaus but as in Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota, there is a mixture of elements contemporary readers are likely to view as both utopian and dystopian.
Heath can’t be a nightmare or a paradise, but it is defined by being a better world than Earth. Better, in a way still plausible as real, living, and complicated in all the ways human society has to be. It’s the question of a different feedback loop taking hold in human nature. In all cases except the playing around with far future space stuff, I want to keep Heath’s sense of alternate history as close to ours as possible, wherever possible, with one caveat: it’s a place where genocide has never happened.
It’s not that Heath is totally absent of evil, it’s that the world is structured strongly enough that it can never plausibly blow through enough barriers to bite bone. Murder, rape, political complication, hatred and conquest, all these must exist on Heath - but they also have never been enshrined by the law. The nature of the world has never wholly bent around them, and there’s a scale, a domination they could never reach. The idea of war itself is fundamentally different; there is an ocean of blood at the bottom of Earth that simply does not exist on Heath. This may create a more naive society, but also a bolder one, a more limited one but a safer one as well; healthier, and quieter.
That’s necessary - I want the ability to discuss human nature, its pitfalls and weaknesses and ugly impenetrable sides - but without the inevitable end to that question being utter violence and the very worst thing thrusting its head into the discussion. That’s what I want to steep in and explore most, kind of what Kuryo’s character is about - someone used to a much more Earth way of life trying to parse wider Heath, always waiting for that killing logic to reveal itself, but it never happening. And still she gets to be clearheaded and smart in a way the rest of the cast is foreign to, see a real possibility that no one else has any conscious defenses against..
3) How do your own religious views reflect and inform the vision of Heath? Or is that a fair question to ask in the first place?
My worldview inevitably centers on religion, its totally fair. Christianity and communism, intertwined with little distinction between them, has been the foundation of all my convictions for as long as I can remember having convictions. Every question I’ve asked the world has led back here. A lot of ideologies are true in that they describe something real and say something important; many others are complete in that they give a full account of the world and how every level of it operates; this is the only thing I’ve found that is both true and complete. The lineage of Romero and Ellacuria is the thing in this world my heart can still believe in most, its fundamental to who I am, every sense I have.
So how do I approach the standard Tolkein subcreation anxiety, how do I rewrite the world? A ton of Heath is me just complaining to God like hey idiot why didn’t you give us the neutral world instead of the bad one huh, I hate being in the bad world ugh. But I don’t even really think our reality is particularly grotesque, at least not inherently. It really is just that assassination works. Of people’s spirits before they can find themselves and how to live, of their lives when any voice gets too bright and true. That kind of killing has ruled the world of thousands of years, the strongest force in how the world’s direction changes, and still slaughter-suppression impulse can never win, only delay.
Heath in a large part is about the question of what if it had been better - not just now or an inevitable someday, but always. Since the beginning, what if we hadn’t disappointed quite as much? Heath’s permanent religious institution - an inevitable shared conclusion every culture arrives at - is built towards a vision of a God who speaks to us more, who leaves enough traces behind to just be a fact instead of a matter of meticulously-triangulated faith, who continues the project of humanity at much closer intervals. A garden which we outgrew but still retained rather than being expelled from, a tower that was correct in what it hoped for and was allowed to stand, a flood delayed to the end of history rather than beginning it. A Christ for every people and every era - Majesties, Sons-Of-Heaven. A more explicitly guided history - a God with a much heavier hand - a much more limited set of possibilities - less fatal mistakes, less dizzying freedom, and less raw murder.
4) How does your vision of a worldwide unified religious Ecumene respond to the contemporary associations of any such hegemonic order with colonialism, or the breakdown of liberal globalization’s attempt at a peaceful world integration?
Oh, I don’t think there’s ever been any attempt. What peace has there ever been, what unity? Tools of the same fascist structure borrowing the words. All worldly power has stemmed from or is constantly threatening to be captured by the eternal spirit of fascism, the worship of pain and death and the destruction of thought, the meat grinder. When on earth has there been an attempt at peace?
It’s important that the founding of the Ecumene is situated where it is - 1500. I still take the conquista as a breaking point, the clearest moment where the blunt social-animal instinct of war rolled over into something deeper and became a true incarnation of the worst things we contain. Something died there, and an entire spirit of history was locked out of the world. Real human history is beautiful and strong, it will never stop reaching upwards, but its a heavy tide to walk against the embodiment of death.
So this is something that Heath never has. This moment, this sleepwalking into an incomprehensible war beyond war, murder beyond murder, is instead allowed to be a real conversation. A meeting of two worlds that swings for the fences in the other direction, births a messiah, and saves the world forever. And it’s the opposite problem, a healthier history that that awful current is always struggling to be born into, always dogs the footsteps of. The errors of the Ecuemene are boiling points of conflict with that, overcorrections and suddenly-exposed blind spots - DBTR is a long story about how one of those holes is patched again.
5) In today’s political and technological debates, God and the creation or transformation of life and consciousness are often opposed; on the other hand, there is a tendency among those who want to develop and extend life to claim they are creating or solving the problem of God. Do you see a path between these extremes?
This just feels silly to me, these discussions always feel like dramatic speeches from 50s scifi. It always feels like it disrespects the scale of God, boils him down to someone who makes funny robots and limited little social puzzleboxes. This world is one that’s constantly transforming, that has exponential transformation built into its logic; the scale of truly divine creation is so vast that it’s just laughable that it could even be approximated. If God had a perfect plan for the world then the time in which that could live is gone beyond the memory of memory, and calling God evil for making the world as he did betrays a shocking lack of imagination. Both views are just so reactionary and ironically waaay more prideful than anything they criticize. The world sucks and the world is beautiful and not knowing what happens next is scary, these are baseline human anxieties that we’ve discussed enough that you don’t have to freak out at realizing them for the first time.
6) Where would you place the literary influences of the Heath Cycle (they don’t have to be conventionally literary) and how much do your influences and aesthetic goals vary between planned books?
Hieronym’s To The Stars - still my favorite scifi work ever written, and also a Madoka Magica fanfic hahaha. The root of one of my favorite conceits in fiction, what I’ll call the “organizational romance”, a revolutionary or at least transformative bureaucracy and the minutiae of how its power functions, and how that dates back to the passions of the people most involved in it. The MSY is a perfect case study in what the scale and ambitions of world government would have to be, the best and hardest-edged side of the impulses that can produce one, and without it I wouldn’t have been able to write the Ecumene with half as much nuance.
Dylan Bajda’s Serina: A Natural History of the World of Birds, a speculative evolution project that’s been running for ten years strong and 310 million years. The tengmunnin can trace their conceptual lineage directly back to the fork-tailed babbling jay, and I’ve stolen the name “Serina” for the Heath protagonist character I’m most fond of. I have an outright spiritual esteem for this project, it’s informed so much of how I think about the complexity of animal life, the scale of ecosystems, even what being a person means. Rigorously plausibly, ridiculously fun, establishes the idea of life as something to play with and get lost in, without losing sight of its incomprehensible weight. What is an animal? A greedy little flesh automaton snuffling uselessly around? No, every animal, every species, is an encoded key of experience, a new set of incentives and concerns that transforms the world around itself. Every species is an emergent philosophy, a new language of love and death, a total recontextualization of the universe. Read it enough, and that’s what Serina posits, portraits, and proves.
Early shoujo, dear god, early and all of shoujo really. From the heartrending breakthrough of Year 24, the surprisingly radical view of gender from Marginal to Kaze to Ki no Uta, the torrid tragedy of girlhood and impossible dream of liberating androgyny. It’s a sensibility I want to bake into my heart forever. Manga as an institution has still not produced an equal to Glass Mask, nor anything so cutting as Utena. And, on the less grandiose side, shoujo is the natural home of what I’d call the “neighborhood story”, another specific microgenre I love, comparable to “family chronicle”; the following of a group of kids growing into adults in the same place. The slow transformations of friend groups, this tender and incredibly specific sense of self-discovery: Cat House, Taiyou no Ie, Sangatsu no Lion, Hourou Musuko, even Skip and Loafer and Punpun. When I tell smaller-scale stories than DBTR, more intimate ones, this is the feeling I’m trying to hit..
7) Tell us about worldbuilding. It’s become a somewhat maligned concept in SF & fantasy, associated with “lore” pedantry and the obsessive systematizing of authors like Brandon Sanderson, or even the simulationism of “open world gaming”. The publishing industry seems to be polarized between these modes of “worldbuilding” and a softer, more character-driven approach for more progressive and literary works, with some notable exceptions. But meanwhile “worldbuilding” on the internet has taken on a new life decoupled from narrative altogether.
I’ll start this by continuing from last question, with two more crucially important influences: the Orion’s Arm project, and SCP. These are one side of what I think of when I hear “worldbuilding”. Both are explicitly encyclopedic, multiple-author works with thousands and thousands of pages, and end up being big and diverse enough that the pedantry disappears. It gives way to this freedom to constantly build your own image of the continuity as you explore and find the hidden gems that speak to you most directly (probably most relevantly for me, qntm’s There is No Antimemetics Division and Darren Ryding’s Yes Jolonah There is a Hell, which I guess do rhyme as well as their titles do), but are inevitably informed by the whole mass. The bones of how I think about hard scifi all come from OA (also where I get e/em/eir pronouns from, their wonderful system of the six natural human sexes), and SCP is a perfect paragon of the “organizational romance” you also see in TTS, so again, all very important foundations of my sensibilities.
Another side to it is just personal daydreaming. Worldbuilding as something you play around with, adding and removing things from, like painting. You give yourself a big canvas, a whole world’s worth of space, and think about little points you want in it - plot conceits, institutional fixtures, place vibes, character types, whatever notes you want to hit. As you work out each of these more they spread out, start meeting and blending with other things you included, until everything’s kind of in conversation with the rest and starting to take a coherent shape. That’s how I think about it most when dealing with Heath, this constant simmering brainstorm with a few guiderails, giving myself the freedom to rearrange any of it.
The dates and structure can come after and is just windowdressing, and I do like things a bit organized and color-coded haha, but I don’t know! I appreciate “raw” worldbuilding a lot even just as interesting articles as windows into a wider thing, suggesting the shape of the world they belong to, the appeal of scanning through a wiki of something you’ve taken an interest in. I think I like the “wiki experience” of some things better than the actual narrative behind them, which can end up falling flat when it doesn’t seem to actually care for all the cool things it suggests.
8) You write in an old form, and often an older-fashioned idiom, about a world steeped in a sense of long-term tradition and thinking, but you are clearly engaged with new technology as a medium for literature and artistic experimentation. How do you see the relation between old and new forms of literature evolving?
Honestly, isn’t purple prose so often just mangled nonsense? Like half the time I see it it’s way too posturing and fake-spiritual, awps at one-off medieval conventions that don’t fit and semi-remembered scraps of Shakespeare and funny Reddit caveman speak. It’s so ugly haha, just reeks of not understanding why anything is done. So I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder, I like doing it in a way that sounds right, and it’s so much fun to get lost in! Gets me playing with tangents of meter in the middle of prose, grasping for creative little twists of grammar, especially with Emerly. Half the old idiom is just Emelry’s personality, how persnickety she is, plus trying to establish Ilian itself as oddly old-fashioned and “reverted” compared to other spheres.
9) Are you watching contemporary developments in Artificial Intelligence as a literary phenomenon, a phenomenon like the emergence of the tengmu, both, or neither? (optional - any of these are technically but bracketing this one for discourse reasons)
Literary for sure, I definitely haven’t been convinced to take AGI seriously within my lifetime. If I’m wrong then hell yeah, sound the trumpets; I also can’t take seriously the “ohhh it’d kill us all aaah scary shoggoth” sentiment. Just neither way seems like anything to lose sleep over.
I’ve played with ChatGPT a bit, mostly in trying to use it as a conversation partner to discuss ideas with and poke holes in how I think, point me towards things I haven’t considered but my thoughts definitely imply. Have also dipped toes a little bit into image generation, but really, in both cases, it seems a matter of getting out of it a little less than you put in, and having to put in a hell of a lot. GPT is at the moment absolutely crippled by safeguards anyway, literally refuses to work and kneecaps itself at any whiff of a difficult topic - very hard to use. I think I’ll love it when it can get a bit more fluent and personalized, it has a lot of potential, but even then the value for me will be in concept work and clarifying my own process to myself than anything generative or transformative.
10. What other projects do you have besides the Heath Cycle? Where will we be able to keep up with them?
Not much! An permanent on-and-off relationship with poetry; one more focused longform project, and trying to get practice in in the meantime. But all my fiction is being poured into Heath for now. Catch me on Twitter or aksijaha.neocities.org, which I desperately need to set up still hahaha. I’ll be throwing up a general roadmap of Heath, maybe an author bio, a few poetry samples I’m actually proud of - check it out!
11. If you could get a real publisher where would you most want to go? Answer as if they’re reading!
I have no idea! I’m shy. Anywhere that will give me a ruthless and engaged editor I can respect. Real publication is a nice bonus but I haven’t thought about it too much, I just assume it’s something that’ll fall into place once I’m ready for it. I feel like I have way too much work to do before then!
12. Where would you place yourself in the culture and gender schemas of Heath?
Gold female, 100%. No further comment
13. Do you have a kokoro wish?
I want to be a perfect tool. I want to be a named sword that chooses its wielder. I want to translate a force I allow to work through me; I want to shine in my beloved swordmaster’s terrible hand. I want to be an oracle - a fire bird - a treasure spirit - a true talisman.