I’m going to introduce the Resonant Earth Series along three themes: 1) Queer, 2) Cyberpunk, and 3) Alternate History. But first, a bit of background on the main character and what’s going on with his brain…
I deliberately wrote about mental illness in a way that is both familiar and uncanny. I want readers to see some commonalities while simultaneously struggling with new concepts around medicalization and stigma.
This is from a Scientific American blog post headline: Mental Illness is Far More Common Than We Know. “New research suggests that nearly everyone will develop a psychological disorder at some point in their life—but for most, it’s temporary.”
For Victor Eastmore, the main character, his mental illness diagnosis is a prison, and he desperately wants to escape. Mirror resonance syndrome causes him to experience extreme emotional transference. He literally feels what other people feel. Mirror resonance syndrome is a neurodegenerative disease with a genetic origin. He suffers from “blank outs,” which is loss of memory, hallucinations, and vivid nightmares. He lives in Semiautonomous California, a nation where people with mirror resonance syndrome are monitored and institutionalized. Most become catatonic by their early 20’s. He is doing better than most, thanks to his family’s substantial resources. But every day is a struggle to cope.
Readers will probably notice a couple of things about Victor in the early chapters of Broken Mirror: his synesthesia, which is when one sense gets translated into another, like when you see musical notes as color or patterns in the air. Victor visualizes people’s emotions as colors and movements. They’ll also notice the stigma and prejudice he faces. One chapter includes a flashback to when he was bullied in middle school
What makes the Resonant Earth Series queer?
First of all, on Resonant Earth, the default sexuality is bisexual, or what the characters call “duophilia.” Duo for two, and philia for attraction. Duophilia—meaning the characters like both genders, male and female. If I were to go back and rewrite the book, I might expand that to include multiple genders and/or a concept I just ran across two weeks ago called “gender-chill,” but duophilia is where my mind was when I started writing Broken Mirror in 2013.
Duophila is no big deal. Being the default. It’s not questioned. It’s not challenged. Characters can express attraction and act on it without raising any eyebrows. Gynophilia or androphilia, being attracted to women or men, respectively, is less common, but there’s no stigma, no persecution, no restriction of citizenship or rights based on gender and sexuality. This is part of why sometimes my novels are referred to as utopian.
This queer aspect is a sort of unobtrusive background for the story, especially Broken Mirror, because the main character is ace, asexual. He’s got no time or interest in sex, really, mainly because he’s preoccupied with trying to stay sane.
. So in terms of sensibility also, the book is very queer in that it’s written from a fringe point of view, from the perspective of an outsider, who at first tries to fit in and then decides that no, he’s going to be himself and it’s the world that has to change. And no, unfortunately, Victor and Ric don’t get together.
What makes the Resonant Earth Series cyberpunk?
For one, I love writing about gadgets and how they change characters daily lives and philosophies about life. Self-driving cars, earbuds, and microphones allow people on Resonant Earth to access artificial intelligences, cybernetic implants, and an alternative to the Internet that doesn’t feature cute animal videos.
I ask readers what they like about the book to get a sense of what resonates. Very often they mention the Springboard Café, which is a hacker haven in the desert, as one of the scenes they remember. Victor and Elena go on to meet Victor’s old roommate, Ozie, who disappeared while they were still in college. Spoiler alert: there’s a bit of a sad love story there, but I won’t say more now.
But overall, Victor’s journey takes him into anti-corporate sabotage, theft, and proto-revolutionary directions. Meanwhile, he has to evade surveillance and work with street-level thugs and anarchists to deploy destabilizing technologies.
What makes the Resonant Earth Series alternate history?
Finally we come to the alternate history piece, and this is a big one that I’ll only be able to touch on. The central idea behind my approach to alternate history is that we’re living in an accidental world. Accidental, yes, because a lot of history twists and turns on gambles and audacious propositions. There are several moments in my lifetime where I feel history turned in the wrong direction.
The history of Resonant Earth might seem utopic. After the Civil War, the Confederacy is not only subdued, but there is a sustained political and cultural transformation that sees women and former slaves lead a successful civil rights movement 100 years earlier than in our world. There’s no Jim Crow. There’s no KKK. A common motto throughout America becomes “skin is skin.” Racism has no place in society, not for individuals and not for the systems that govern them. Reparations are paid to both former slaves and native tribes. Racism is a choice. On Resonant Earth, they chose not to.
Also, on Resonant Earth, Abraham Lincoln survived the assassination attempt. Germany assembled a few key allies and won the First World War, enabling it to steadily gobble up all of Europe over the subsequent decades to become a superpower. The empires of China and Japan, locked in brutal, destructive combat for most of the century, lay waste to much of Asia and the Indian subcontinent. The United States, bankrupted by war, repartitioned into the nine sovreign nations of the American Union, one of which is Semiautonomous California.
If 9/11 was an event that transformed America, then the Carmichael Massacre is what transformed Semiautonomous California. Twenty years before the start of the Resonant Earth Series, a man named Samuel Miller went on a destructive rampage that destroyed Carmichael and cost hundreds of lives. One survivor lived through the nightmare and became a crusader for justice, which meant the creation of a Commission that cracked down on mirror resonance syndrome, which was thought to be a dangerous disorder.
The Resonant Earth Series is available wherever books are sold. I recommend The Resonant Earth Publishing Webstore or Bookshop.org.