Interviewing Essa Hansen

Helloooo!

I recently really enjoyed Nophek Gloss by Essa Hansen an exhilarating piece of science fiction with lots of action, interesting characters and a huge variety of aliens. Essa kindly agreed to answer a few questions about the book.

How would you book tempt Nophek Gloss?

Therapy speedrun in space!

Serious version: it’s a fast-paced but character-driven story about a wronged survivor willing to harm and reshape himself for justice against an enemy too vast and clandestine to confront. It’s set in a bubble multiverse design that present day physicists have not yet imagined, and filled with innovative concepts that bend the genre. Who better to explore such a multiverse—and heal such a protagonist—than a found family crew of misfit aliens on a starship that has a soul of its own?

What led you to the idea of the multiverse and its various factions?

The bubble multiverse was inspired by extrapolating real life foam structures at both small and galactic scales, then introducing the idea that physical parameters are unique inside each bubble-shaped “universe.” What happens if technology and biology is transformed in various ways through each crossover between universes…and back again? What would this translation mean for economy, exploration, and exploitation? I love big scope questions like this.

The four large factions arose naturally from this premise. The Cartographers attempt to coordinate the vast diversity of the multiverse and make it safe by incentivizing exploration. The Dynast seeks a utopian society in isolation within the largest, oldest, and most central universe. The passagers are a lawless group of free explorers motivated by profit, progress, and personal goals. The Casthen are the grand exploiters playing a long game of controlling environments and species across centuries in order to gain an economic monopoly in the multiverse.

Caiden has an interesting young teen/grown dimension to his character – was that a challenge to write?

I actually didn’t start out intending a bildungsroman story. I began with an adult protagonist in a known world, and it was in exploring that character’s origins that Nophek Gloss took off into a story of its own. (So much for writing one small backstory scene!)

Caiden starts the book at 14 and ages up technologically to 20 by the middle of the novel, but his growth is nonstandard, shaped by both advanced technological opportunities and by a trauma that requires him to mature too quickly. In this way his story has a different shape than most coming-of-age tales, and the adult themes and cast involved made it easier to write. The philosophical ideas, ethical dilemmas, and dark content of the story didn’t feel out of place in a story about a young creature misplaced in his own understanding of the world.

The initial version of the plot was much slower paced, focusing on Caiden’s relationships with his chosen family and the slow healing of his trauma while he came to grips with the new world around him. He aged in gradual increments. But the revenge narrative was dangling there in the background, so during edits (also very time constrained) I had to pull the two together while keeping the word count contained. The result was a faster paced narrative in which Caiden doesn’t have time or space to heal until he’s changed the world around him. Instead, he has to reshape his trauma into a strength to survive and once and for all end the situation—the machine—that had given him and others these wounds.

This is one of the most visual and varied approach to aliens I’ve read in a while. Did you enjoy your imagination going wild? Did you find your film background influence those choices?

Thank you! Creating new aliens, creatures, tech, plants, and environments has been the funnest part of this trilogy. I have a very sensory imagination (hyperphantasia), so usually I have a clear sense of what I want to convey, and the big challenge becomes translating that into prose in a clear descriptive way. Readers who are sensory-minded tend to comment on how easily the world springs into focus for them, while others feel the style slows them down and takes more mental chewing to absorb.

My work in film definitely influences me in terms of storytelling craft. Visually, I think I’m more inspired by the dynamic, boundary-crossing action style of anime and manga, which I absorbed a lot of as a teenager. And I draw much inspiration from Earth plant and animal biology and ecological mechanics, as well as extrapolating more obscure sciences—especially quantum mechanics—into a perceivable, interactable sensory allegory.

What are your favourite types of science fiction?

I love science fiction that reaches into the theoretical, the cutting-edge ideas, even the metaphysical… asking what’s possible and trying out wild ideas to explore new ways of understanding the universe we live in. Ideas that make our minds stretch, make us observe our lives from newly turned angles. The border between science fiction and modern day theoretical scientific thinking is closer than we think, conjoined by a similarity in creative thinking.

I also love the border between science and spirituality, where the fantastical happens, where language starts to fail us, where it gets less clear cut how to interpret or examine.

I guess I also like science fantasy that blends without any border. I grew up with cross-genre JRPGs like Chrono Trigger, Terranigma, and the Final Fantasy franchise, which did amazing things to leverage the strengths of that cross-genre space.

What else can we look forward to from you next and where can we hear more from you?

Azura Ghost, the sequel to Nophek Gloss, launches February 1st, 2022. It has metaphysics and strange dimensions, betrayals and alliances, multiversal war, reveals the Azura’s true form, and includes a new point-of-view character with a found family of her own.

I’m most active on Twitter @EssaHansen where you can also hear about my post production sound work on SFF films. I’m a bit on Instagram at the same handle, and I have a Facebook author page for news updates. My website—www.essahansen.com—has book information, glossaries, and event links as well as a sign up for a very periodic newsletter of updates and gifts/giveaways.