A Few Quick Questions With…Herman Steuernagel

For this next part of the tour, I have a quick Q&A with the author, Herman Steuernagel. I had to come up with these questions before starting the book, which is a different approach for me. I think it came out not-terribly-awkward. Either way, I enjoyed reading the answers and hope you will, too.

The words that got me to take a second look at the description for this book were “space pirates,” and I bet I’m not alone. Do you have theories (or just speak for yourself) about why pirates in general, or space pirates in particular, grab our imaginations the way they do?
I think there’s a rebellious part of all of us that sees pirates as these carefree individuals who decided to live outside of society’s expectations of us. There’s something in us that looks at it as a life of adventure, outside of the constraints of the day to day.

Space pirates, I think, is just an extrapolation of that, and definitely in Eclipse I’ve tried to make that comparison.
One our main characters, Mikka, left that life of piracy behind in order to become a responsible adult in her world. And I think in many ways many of us can relate to that experience. We grow up and suddenly we realize there are bills to pay and family to take care of, and part of us wishes that we could return to that life of adventure that we dreamed of growing up.

One of the side characters, Abigail Monroe, is almost a caricature of a sea pirate in a space setting. She provides a bit of comic relief in what would otherwise be a dark world. She very much represents that sense of
[The remainder of his answer was lost in cyberspace, sadly. Just think of this as an enticement to read the book. What does she represent?]

Looking over your website, it looks like you’ve designed three unique worlds at this point in your career. In general, and with this book specifically, what’s your approach to worldbuilding? Do you sit down and figure it all out ahead of time (setting, technology, culture(s), etc.?) or do you just make up most/all of it on the fly as you come across the need while writing?
There’s a bit of both actually. For Eclipse and the Fractured Orbit in particular, a lot of it was decided in advance. The world is set a couple hundred years in the future, I wanted the technology to be mostly feasible with the knowledge we have now. There are a couple of things that are a little more fantastical, such as artificial gravity and force fields that are currently outside of our capabilities, but it is far enough in the future that somehow we figured it out.

So with that in mind, I now have some constraints on what is feasible in this universe. We’re not traveling to different systems and galaxies, because we don’t have faster-than-light travel. The worlds in our system are not completely terraformed because we have no technological way to do that, so our colonies exist in pockets or bubbles.

Other things are constrained a bit to reality, so it’s more research than creation – like what exists on different moons and asteroids on our solar system. These types of things get passing mentions in Eclipse, but they’re talked about a bit more in future books.

Other things like how the Empire maintains its control on these colonies, there’s a bit more “on the fly” that happens within the drafting process. And then it’s just a matter of keeping track of everything so that it stays consistent. For that I have a combination of Trello boards, spreadsheets and documents where I keep this information stored.

For you, at the end of the day—creating believable characters, worldbuilding, or the story—what’s harder? What’s more rewarding? What do your readers tend to react to the most?
Ultimately characters are who the readers are going to relate to. It try to create my characters with realistic ambitions, needs and flaws. It’s that emotional journey that will draw a reader into the story and keep them invested in the plot. Pulling that off is definitely the most important and rewarding part of the process.

That said, building the world is a lot of fun, because, especially in a sci-fi or fantasy setting, you get to play a bit more. This is where you get to think about the “what if” questions. What if we colonized the moon, Mars? What if we had to abandon Earth in order to save it? What if corporate elites took advantage of that?

No matter how many books you have under your belt, as I understand, each novel/series tends to be a different experience than the one(s) before. What was the part what was the biggest surprise about the process of writing Eclipse? Either, “I can’t believe X is so easy!” or “If I had known Y was going to be so hard, I’d have skipped this and watched more TV”?
I got to the end of the first draft of Eclipse and realized the part one of the characters had to play in the story. Which sounds like a funny thing, but there was one side character who I realized had a bigger role to play, especially in the books going forward, so I had to go back and work that into the rest of the plot. It was definitely an “ah-ha!” moment at the end of the book for me that I wasn’t expecting.

The book has been out a few months now, is there a particular supporting character that your readers have responded to in a way you didn’t expect? Talk about them a little bit and how the reaction is different. What’s the key, for you, in writing a great supporting character, and how did that (if you can manage this without an essay) work with this particular character?
The side character that gets talked about the most is Abigail Monroe. This was kind of by design.

We meet Abigail in the Prologue of Eclipse, and it’s really the only chance we get to see her point of view. This is continued in the prologues of the sequels, but we’re kind of seeing a glimpse into her mind, and then we get to watch how other characters interact with her in the following narrative.

Abigail came to me as this female version of Jack Sparrow, who was really just your typical movie pirate. A lot of people love her, because she’s off the wall, erratic, and you really don’t know where she stands, if she’s a hero or a villain, and it’s really going to take the length of the series before we know for sure what she’s all about. But because there’s this familiarity about her, and what we’ve come to expect from a humorous type of pirate, I think readers are able to find something they can relate to in this otherwise dark and dystopian setting.

Readers either love her or hate her. She’s a lot of fun to write because she’s so enigmatic and erratic, but she also has a particular speech tic that some readers found over the top. Which is maybe a fair criticism, so it does get toned down a little bit in the following books. But even though she’s not a POV character, we also do get to see a bit of her character arc develop over the course of the series, and I think by the end people are going to have a very different opinion of Abigail and what’s driving her.

A supporting character reflects the main character, they highlight a main character’s strengths and/or weaknesses and that can take shape in either an antithesis to them, as a single part of their personality traits, or as a mirror. But it’s also important for a side character to have their own life to them as well. They need goals, needs and desires in order to make them realistic and believable. They also need flaws. And I think that the reception to Abigail has indicated that she does have all of these things. People love her because of her eccentricities, but they don’t like her flaws.

However, she does have a very important role to play in the story and Abigail is also very much an exaggerated mirror of Mikka in a lot of ways.

Thanks for your time and participation! I’m looking forward to seeing what Eclipse has to offer!
Thank you so much for including me! I hope you enjoy the book!

My thanks to Escapist Book Tours for the invitation to participate in this tour and the materials (including the novel) they provided. The opinions expressed by me are honest and my own.