Historical Fantasy
Date Published: September 1, 2024
Publisher: Roundfire Books
Capitán Cristóbal de Varga's drive for glory and gold in 1538 Peru leads him and his army of conquistadors into a New World that refuses to be conquered. He is a man torn by life-long obsessions and knows this is his last campaign. What he doesn't know is that his Incan allies led by the princess Sarpay have their own furtive plans to make sure he never finds the golden city of Vilcabamba. He also doesn't know that Héctor Valiente, the freed African slave he appointed as his lieutenant, has found a portal that will lead them all into a world that will challenge his deepest beliefs. And what he can't possibly know is that this world will trap him in a war between two eternal enemies, leading him to question everything he has devoted his life to - his command, his Incan princess, his honor, his God. In the end, he faces the ultimate dilemma: how is it possible to battle your own obsessions . . . to conquer yourself?
Interview with Dirk Strasser
What inspired you to write Conquist?
I can tell you the precise moment of inspiration for Conquist. I was nine years old and in hospital for an extended time when a family friend gave me a copy of Hergé’s Tintin and Prisoners of the Sun (soon to be a Peter Jackson movie). It’s a graphic novel set in Peru which features a lost city of Incas who have remained hidden from the modern world and continued worshipping their sun god.
Tintin and Prisoners of the Sun from Wikipedia
I lost count of how many times I reread that book during those bedridden weeks. It was the first time I experienced the immersive magic of fiction. I lost myself in the story every single time I read it. The noise of the crowded ward, the fear of my next operation, the tedium of the days, the chaos of acrid medical smells all disappeared, and I was there with Tintin and Captain Haddock, trekking in knee-deep snow, scaling the Andes, and fighting my way through the Amazon jungle. How was this happening? Even when I knew off by heart every plot twist, every turn and surprise, I was always as thrilled and breathless as the previous time. While I was in the story bubble, nothing else in the world mattered. It was pure joy in a joyless place.
Many years later I trekked the Inca trail to Machu Picchu in Peru before it was crowded with tourists (thanks to the Shining Path terrorists being disbanded just months earlier), and it felt at times as if I was exploring some new territory. I can still remember the morning when I stood on the steps below the Sun Gate where Cristóbal stands in the opening scene of Conquist, like him blinded by the rising sun.
Machu Picchu from Wikipedia
I’ve been carrying the Conquist story, whose fuse was lit by my nine-year-old self, inside my head for most of my life. It was first published as a short story in 2008 in the HarperVoyager anthology Dreaming Again edited by Jack Dann. The Nebula and World Fantasy-winning author was sold by the one sentence pitch I gave him “Conquist is the story of an army of conquistadors who invade a fantasy world searching for gold”. From there, the story grew into something much more than a simple quest for gold and turned into a deeper tale of betrayal, religion, redemption and obsession.
Can you tell us a little bit about the characters in Conquist?
Cristóbal de Varga is a conquistador frustrated by a lifetime of watching others gain wealth and glory as he himself merely grows older. He is a man torn by his obsessions, and he knows he is running out of time. When he finds himself in a strange new world that forces him to challenge every belief he has ever had, he makes a decision that results in the blood of thousands on his hands and the loss of his command. In his search for redemption, Cristóbal has to face and conquer the obsessions that have defined his life.
The Incan princess Sarpay is arguably the most successful character in the novel in terms of achieving her aims, and those aims are noble ones, and yet she ends up being conflicted. She takes her obsession with saving the Incan Empire from the Spanish to extremes and to her own detriment. She schemes against Cristóbal with the same intensity as he pursues his obsessions. Sarpay recognizes this in a scene towards the end of the novel where she explains her betrayal by saying “You of all people should be able to understand, Cristóbal.”
Pizarro Seizing the Inca of Peru-painting from Wikipedia
_-_Pizarro_Seizing_the_Inca_of_Peru_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg)
Lieutenant Rodrigo Benalcázar was directly modelled on the real-life conquistador Francisco Pizarro. He is unrelentingly brutal, and although Rodrigo is following the Pizarro playbook, it doesn’t work out quite the same way for him, and he is too inflexible to change his tack. His motivation, like most of the conquistadors is to escape the grinding poverty he had been born into. Also like most of the conquistadors he is illiterate and resents the educated Cristóbal for his noble pretensions.
Painting of Francisco Pizarro from Wikipedia
Can you tell us a little bit about what you have planned for the future?
The new novel I’m working on is called The Myriad. I usually like to play around with back cover blurbs to see what might intrigue potential readers. Here’s the current version of the blurb:
Many cities are spoken of as lost. The city of Myriad is the only one that is truly lost, not just to our world, but to all worlds.
There is a place between the worlds where all things are held in abeyance, where a pregnant nothingness reigns. This is where the lost city of Myriad drifts with the tides of chaos.
Every now and again the city comes into contact with a new world. A momentary juncture. This is the only time the inhabitants of Myriad can leave the prison of their walls. And leave they must, because nothing truly lives within the city’s walls bar the inhabitants themselves—and some say even they do not truly live as we do. All food and water must be taken from these worlds that randomly adjoin Myriad for a time.
Yet there are dangers in these worlds that are totally unknown to the inhabitants of Myriad. And when the nexus with these worlds is broken and an inhabitant is outside the walls, they will never be able to return because the city will vanish from that world forever.
And there is danger far greater than this for the unfortunates lost to their city in this way. Within the walls of Myriad, the inhabitants are immortal. Outside they become mortal.
So, the immortals inside the walls are doomed to eternally travel between a myriad of worlds, seeking to return to the world of their origin, to right the wrong that exiled them into the restless void, to find final peace.
The Myriad is the story of the mortal-born woman who brings them to that peace.
About the Author
Dirk Strasser’s epic fantasy trilogy The Books of Ascension—Zenith, Equinox and Eclipse—was published in German and English, and his short stories have been translated into several languages. “The Doppelgänger Effect” appeared in the World Fantasy Award-winning anthology Dreaming Down Under. His historical fantasy novel Conquist was published in 2024. The serialized version of Conquist was a finalist in the Aurealis Awards Best Fantasy Novel category. Dirk’s screenplay version of Conquist won the Wildsound Fantasy/Sci-Fi Festival Best Scene Reading Award and was a featured finalist in the Cinequest Film & Creativity Festival and the Creative World Awards. He is the co-editor of Australia’s premier science fiction and fantasy magazine, Aurealis, and was a judge on the 2024 Sydney Science Fiction Film Festival Screenplay Awards. Dirk has been a high school teacher, a writer of best-selling textbooks, an educational software developer, a publishing manager, and a soccer club president.
Contact Links
.png)
1 comments:
Tantalizing cover, congrats
Post a Comment