Interview with Thomas Wrightson, Author of The Cluster Cycle Series

Thomas, thank you for coming and interviewing! I got to read a bit of your second book Lost Station Circe, which is releasing July 30th, and it was a really cool world. To start out I'd love to hear what your books are about, what is your elevator pitch of the series?

 Thomas Wrightson: Well, the Cluster Cycle is basically old stories, like Monte Cristo, Treasure Island, Golden Age detective novels… Not retellings in the sense of just replicating events, but rather those story concepts in a Sci-Fi setting with a modern twist. Lost Station Circe is basically taking elements of Treasure Island and The Odyssey and setting them around a group of original characters. It’s a story that's very character driven, not very plot driven, about their personal development and what happens to them within this scenario. Lost Station Circe is a location in the book and it's based on the island of the enchantress Circe, and you will see the reference when you get into that part of the book. But, basically, this series is: old stories, sci-fi setting with a modern twist. 

Perfect! So what drew you to writing sci-fi, and incorporating elements of these classic stories into your own?

The whole series started after I watched an anime from Studio Gonzo called Gankutsuou. It's basically an extremely faithful retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo, and I thought, “I can do that,” so I started writing it as an experiment that turned into a 100,000+ word book. I pitched it to multiple publishers, as you do, and I got an acceptance from Roan & Weatherford. And then it was a, “Help, I’ve pitched a series!” situation. I needed to do a whole series of these now and had said in a rather blasé way, “Oh about five or six books.” When I got faced with the fact that I had to deliver I decided, why not just follow on from the theme? I had some stories that were previously not part of the Cluster Cycle just knocking around in my notes, so I adopted them into the Cluster Cycle with suitable amendments and revisions and they became the five books of the series across a thousand years of history, talking about these peoples in this Cluster. If I only did Dumas or only one particular author, I thought it would get quite boring. Especially with Dumas who wrote Monte Cristo, the only other book he’s really known for is The Three Musketeers, and that couldn't really support a whole series in my opinion. 

What drew me to sci-fi as well is because it’s one of my favorite genres, and how the Cluster Cycle came together as a universe was sort of based on a different series, like Mass Effect. There are aspects of this universe that I find a bit meh to be honest, some of it is very anthropomorphized, although I do like the races that go a bit overboard. That concept of race, I know it doesn't have the negative associations that it did but when we’re classifying something as an alien race we're sort of putting them in the same bucket as people used to put BIPOC or LGBT groups. So I decided that part of how I constructed my universe would be that they're called peoples, except in very specific dialogue from characters and that's supposed to be coding that they’re maybe not that great, when they're referring to the “human race” or “mankind”. But yeah, it's basically where it came from.

That's really interesting. I definitely saw in the sample different prejudices and classism depending on who you are and how you were born.

I don't think that will ever change in humans, or any species that has sapience, to distinguish based on arbitrary differences. 

That's fair. So we kind of touched on this, but what were some of your inspirations and influences for this series? 

In terms of the writers I drew inspiration from, in terms of the level of science I was going for in this science fiction, I leaned more toward Arthur C. Clarke than George Lucas. Harder science. No teleporters, no magic (which is what the Force is), leaning more towards theoretically plausible stuff. A paper somewhere could probably obliterate the science into a million tiny pieces and it would be reduced to science fantasy.

In terms of story and characters, the writings of Frank Herbert and Ursula K. Le Guin. They are two of my absolute favorites in the science fiction genre as a whole. I say this having read not a huge amount of their work because I'm terrible at reading, I've got dyslexia, and a very specific kind that means I can't read some types of fonts very well. But so, all these and the classics are basically where I got a lot of inspiration for the series. 

Speaking of characters, your characterization was really great, I felt like I attached early on to the characters I met. Who was easiest to write or harder to write? Are there any fun facts about them that aren't on the page?

Oh, picking favorites! I think the one that was easiest to write was Solet, the captain, because his whole shtick is fairly simple compared to the rest of the others that get meaningful development throughout the whole book. And the ones that were hardest to do properly were the two with the familial relationship, Faarax and Lenore, mother and son. There's also a pair of siblings, Sinestra and Dexter, who are brother and sister. Portraying complicated relationships, like Lenore and Faarax you get from the get-go that their relationship is not normal, that was part of why it was fun writing it. But also difficult, because I wanted to get it properly characterized. That's another thing about this series, I don't like the whole Good Guys vs. Bad Guys shtick. It's more protagonist vs. antagonist, where the morality is whatever the heck you like. The brother sister Sinestra and Dexter are not heroes, but I realized that they have a very close bond, as some might see as unnaturally close, and I wanted to make it very clear from sections written in their perspective that they are not engaged in any kind of prohibitive stuff. It's not that kind of sibling relationship that some media just likes to fawn over for whatever reason, but they're just extremely close. And having had close relationships with my two sisters at various points in my life, that was a thing to do, but then neither of my sisters are killers, nor am I, so there’s that. 

As far as off page, I always thought of Solet as gay. I never really put that on the page explicitly. I think there may be a mention somewhere that he prefers males to females. But the whole point of his species, and something that I unintentionally or intentionally created across the whole story, is that I tried to make this series very LGBT inclusive. I mean, I'm bisexual myself. It just felt right that the human selectiveness and prejudices that exist is seen in the Cluster as rather weird, that they have solid gender boundaries or they were mostly male-dominational historically. So yeah, I always thought of Solet as gay, he prefers males. I don't think that was particularly emphasized, it was just something in the back of my mind as I was writing him, which made writing him both fun and relatively easy. Compared to bisexual characters, gay and lesbian characters have a lot more positive media representation that I can draw on. The last book in the series has a bisexual lead and I did not want him to be the stereotypical bisexual as far as possible.

You did a really great job at sounding very technical. What was your world building process like? What type of research did you need to do for the science behind your world?

And believe it or not, a lot of that was bluster. For some of the science I did need to work out some of the principles, like theoretically how would a warp engine realistically work? And then it was a process of logical elimination about travel time reduction and things. It was that kind of research. And also, what realistically might an android have to do maintenance, like having micro jacks at various points or having different panels, where would they be if you wanted to do maintenance on them. And then of course the structure of the space stations, the titular station Circe has lots of interconnected sections and I needed to make sure that all the sections interlinked properly and of course all the levels. There was a long note list with lots of mapping out, where I said okay, D13 was the engineering deck and D1 was the bridge and everything in between was juggling things and trying not to get them mixed up. 

I don’t know how you keep it together, especially across multiple books…

The thing about the Cluster Cycle is that it's not a single continuous narrative where the same characters will consistently appear, because it's spanning a thousand years, and that helps with worldbuilding. Starborn Vendetta is technically second in the series chronologically, and Lost Station Circe is the fourth. I drop hints in each of them, that you will understand when you read other bits of the series, but that kind of structure means you can jump in anywhere. You don't have to know who a certain character is from a previous book. That's something I really detest about a lot of modern media, you have to absorb all of it to have a hope. So that made the worldbuilding much easier, I had rough notes for each of them and then I did the detail work for each one individually and I put in references here and there so that it would feel like a cohesive hole when it came out. 

Yeah, I liked the references back to ancient Earth too. That was cool. 

Well the whole point of the humans of Earth in this series is that they fled from Earth to the Cluster which is basically on the opposite side of the galaxy. The galactic core is between where Earth is and where the Cluster is, this serendipitously dense grouping of stars with habitable worlds. And humans have been there for so long that they don't know how to get back home and they've set up shop there. Actually, the third book is set before they're inducted into the Synod, which is not exactly an overarching government but they keep the peace except in certain affairs where they don't want to interfere, basically a huge Council with representatives from each world. But the second one is long after they've been established, ancient Earth is borderline a myth. The fifth one goes into how they rediscover it, and the ramifications of that. That was the whole concept. I decided that part of the defining portrayal of humans is that they’re eternal outsiders, eternal immigrants, because they do not have a homeworld to go back to unlike all the other species introduced. 

It will be interesting to see how that all pans out! So shifting gears a bit, what made you want to be a writer and choose novels as your medium?

Well, it just kind of happened. That's quite an answer! I was creating stories with things like my cuddly toys and bits of Duplo, Lego, that kind of thing, and there were a few stories that really grabbed my attention, not because of the ancillary stuff around them but because of their stories. Bionicle, especially. That was a 10-year story-driven toy line, and I liked Bionicles as a toy for a period, but the story was magical. And my earliest attempt at writing something was Bionicle fanfiction in an exercise book while I was watching my parents build a shed. I couldn't hand write very well, but I got a computer to use for myself to play any games that could run on the thing, it was ancient, and then I just started writing things out. The early fiction was absolutely dreadful, horribly derivative, I'm embarrassed to think about it. But it got me started, and then I sort of worked up from there. Due to circumstances, I didn't go through my country's standard education system. But I just decided that I really wanted story creation, working with words, to be my living. I could have ended up going in a direction where I wrote video game scripts, or scripts. But novels were where I felt most comfortable, because short stories, I find, don't really give me enough room. It's an interesting challenge writing a story that can be contained in a short story. But the long form novel is where I actually found something to catch on to, characters where I had a sense of control, and I could create whatever world I wanted. So if one of the characters in Mass Effect, for instance, was not very satisfying to me I could think up something. There was some stuff in Andromeda, about how the different species were interacting, that seemed a bit weird to me, so the fourth book in the Cluster Cycle is about a first contact situation because of that. 

I did fall off my bike and my writing head sort of kicked into gear after that. I'm not sure whether my neurons got rearranged. There have been some studies that show that your brain focuses on something that is core to you after something like that. For me, it was story creation and writing I suppose. So yes, I have books, it’s because of a head injury. That's the joke answer. 

I love it! It’s like that saying, you write because you have to. It seems like that's pretty true for you.

Yeah, actually, there is a beautiful quote from Isaac Asimov, he may not be the greatest person in some respects, but he did create one of the best quotes about writing ever. ‘I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die.’ It sort of stuck with me. 

So my final question is: How do you hope that these books will impact your readers? What themes are most important for you to convey?

I primarily wrote them to be engaging stories that would not be… there's a thing that could be called negative influence, as in a story you actively don't want to emulate. And for me, that's James Cameron's Avatar. The conflict is so simplistic, the morals so duncy, the environmental storytelling just batters you over their heads so hard. I think I would have liked it more if the aliens hadn't been so humanoid. The Na’vi or the Asari, Turians, anything from Doctor Who. That’s one thing about the aliens in the Cluster Cycle, I wanted them to be more animal-like. So the Feles have digitigrade legs, the Kavki look like weird fish-frog things. Even though they're all basically humanoid, that's a concession I had to make, they're still ‘other’ enough that you couldn't mistake them for people in suits. You could have substituted the Na’vi for people painted blue and it would not have made a blind bit of difference. I like characters that aren't simple, where there's no explicit right and wrong. When you dig a little deeper into history, there are cases where not everyone can be applied to this. I know it's a bit of a rote example to draw, but not everyone in Germany supported Adolf Hitler during World War II, a huge amount of people didn't and suffered for it. And in the war, the Allies turned to some pretty dirty tactics in order to win, and given what they were facing you could say they were in their rights. But with time and distance, you can say that would not fly today. It's that moral gray area. Or the Vietnam war that was painted as a conflict of absolute good vs. absolute evil, but was just a mess and a tragedy for everyone involved. The soldiers on both sides, the people caught in the middle.

Starborn Vendetta is a story of revenge, it's based on Monte Cristo. But the key thing is, the protagonist is not strictly in the right. They're doing this for a selfish reason and I want to make it clear. The original draft made her a lot more callous and cruel, my editor really wanted me to tone it down so that she'd be a more appealing protagonist. I turned it down a bit, I hope she still comes off as an insert-descriptive-here when it comes to some of the things she does. That's the kind of thing I want people to maybe think about. These are people, I want to write stories about people, not moralities. There's been a flowering of good stories like that. 

Something else I think about is the inclusiveness, whether bipoc or LBGT characters, and that is important, absolutely, but something that can really make me feel a bit ‘meh’ is when that inclusiveness is shouted from the rooftops to the point where it blocks out the story and the characters. Like someone being gay supersedes all the rest of their characterization, or their tokenized as, “Here's a trans character,” and that's the extent of their characterization. That actually makes it worse, because that's a kind of codification. It's almost like basing the audience. So, if I make a character black, gay, trans, intersex, that's kind of like saying this person wears black. So if it figures into the story, that's fine. But I don't want it to be the overriding be-all-end-all of who they are, because I think that's an important step towards normalizing those peoples into a more accepting inclusive world and society. Yes, they do need championing and hailing, but they also need normalizing. They need to be incorporated into the whole, so that they can just walk down the street and nobody will bat an eye. They can go wherever they feel or want to, legally allowed to go in, and nobody will put up a fuss. Everyone can go into the same club and have a great time and you don't have to say it's explicitly for one demographic or another. I think that's another reason that I didn't really emphasize those things, like Solet being gay or having a non-gender binary character. I didn't make a deal out of them not using she/her or he/him pronouns, I just had them in there and they were just making their living on that station, just being like anyone else. Why make a big deal of it? Especially that far in the future, where that kind of fluidity is just part of the background noise rather than anything special.

I know that can sound really dismissive. I realize I am in both a privileged and non-privileged position, because I am white and male. I know I'm bisexual, but I don't obviously show myself to be. So I can sound like I'm talking down from a privileged position. But I really feel like that's part of the normalization process, not judging people by their appearance, and not allowing them to speak only if they conform to a certain stereotype, which is harmful in and of itself. Taken out of context, any of my comments here could be turned into vitriol and used to destroy me, but it's something that I feel is in my stories. Normalization of marginalized groups, not by them being touted but by them being part of the story and important characters, and what they are is just a side part of their characterization, like the color of their hair. 

It’s interesting, it helps people know where these stories are coming from, this background is why interviews are so helpful. Do you have any other things you’d like readers to know about what's coming? 

Well, what's coming… Lost Station Circe is the second book in The Cluster Cycle series that’s five books long. The next one hasn't gone into edits yet, but it's a tribute to Golden Age detective novels, like Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, that style. So expect a, hopefully, engaging murder mystery set during a period of political turmoil in the Cluster. The fourth one is basically my take on an H.G. Wells-esque situation. It's a first contact story which I had great fun writing, that's my personal favorite out of the series. And the fifth one is sort of wrapping up the series, it's closing off some characters and loops. Small spoiler, one character from Lost Station Circe will feature in the final book, so there is a bit of continuity there. And at the core of it, it's a gay romance, and hopefully a relatively realistic look at someone who is going through trauma, not just the physical kind but the kind of psychological stuff that can go with that. I mean who knows, it might get completely removed in the edits, but yeah, they're all coming from Roan & Weatherford. They seem to be coming out in seven to eight month intervals. 

I've got several other things in the pipeline. My current work in progress is based in Japan, it's a single book and it's a fantasy story spanning history with a prologue set in the Heian period, and the rest of the story takes place in chunks between the Muromachi period in 1213, and the current Reiwa era in 2019. 

If you want Starborn Vendetta, it's available in all three major formats from mainstream stores. And for Lost Station Circe, paperbacks will probably be released six months after the hardback and ebook version in July. 

Well, thank you very much for taking the time to chat! We really appreciate it!

Born in 1994, Thomas Wrightson has spent much of his life creating narratives and characters. Home schooled, he currently lives on the island Ynys Mon in Wales, surrounded by beautiful scenery and unpredictable weather.

His current project is The Cluster Cycle, a space opera pentalogy. The first entry, Starborn Vendetta, is a tale of revenge setting the stage for a new and mysterious universe.