The Hand of the Sun King by J. T. Greathouse tells the story of one boy, growing to be a man, trapped between two worlds, struggling to please both, and consumed by an ambition that sets him on the path to save or destroy everything he holds dear. Told in the first person, The Hand of the Sun King, drops the reader right into the heart of the story and this brand new world.
With elements of many cultures, mostly from Asia and the Middle East, there is a lot to explore in this book and Wen Alder journeys to more than one of them. As we experience each through his eyes, the distinct flavour of the culture is front and centre of the story, as he tries to grasp the subtleties of the magic, politics, and come to terms with his own divided background.
There is a great confidence in the way the author carries the story from political intrigue to magnificent set pieces. The ending is epic in the proportions of The Magician by Raymond E. Feist and the political maneuvering reminiscent of Ken Liu’s The Grace of Kings.
Alder’s greatest desire is to experience magic as he did in one ill-fated moment, but this time bring it under his control. It is a quest for knowledge, to learn and understand his place in the world and to master the one thing that might make him different, stand out, and be his own person. It is this drive which pushes him on, encourages him to take risks, and leaves him open to betrayal and double-dealing. Friendships in the stratified world he grows up within are hard won, and familial loyalty is secondary only to fealty to the Emperor.
I’ve been in something of a reading drought; nothing much catching and holding my attention recently—this book broke through and I devoured it within a few days. It ticked all my boxes and sets up a thrilling sequel.
Oh, and that cover!!! It is gorgeous! (More on that below).
Now, after reading, I got in touch with the author and he graciously agreed to answer a few questions… read on to find out more!
Where did your inspiration for The Hand of the Sun King come from?
It was sort of a coalescence of a bunch of different sources of inspiration into one project. Since I first read it almost two decades ago now, A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA has been one of my favorite books and Earthsea has been one of my favorite series. I think the influence on THE HAND OF THE SUN KING is obvious in a lot of ways—a very talented but arrogant main character who goes off to become his world’s version of a wizard, learning how to transform into a bird along the way—but this was far from my first attempt to write a Ged-esque protagonist. Previous attempts tended to fail because I didn’t have a nailed down a setting that worked for the story yet or a particularly unique or interesting thematic idea.
The source of inspiration for the setting came about while I was in college. I studied history and philosophy, with a focus on East Asia, and spent some time living in Beijing during my undergraduate education and then teaching in Taiwan after college. As I’m sure most writers do, I catalogued real-life experiences to use later in my fiction, and in particular I found inspiration in various gardens and palace estates in mainland China. I wanted to write a story set in similar locations, but that was about as far as the idea went at that point.
While studying, I became very fascinated by the parallel intellectual traditions of Confucianism and Daoism. I’m far from a true expert, but one of my observations while studying these traditions was the way in which Daoist philosophy, particularly the writings of Zhuang-Zi, seems in some ways to be a reaction against Confucianism, or at least an attempt to articulate a nervousness with Confucianism’s moral certainty. That’s by no means a complete description of the relationship between Confucianism and Daoism, but it’s a thing I latched onto and became fascinated by, particularly in its similarity to the dynamic between modernist and postmodernist thought, in which postmodernism also expresses a deep suspicion of modernism’s certainty around all sorts of things, but mostly the arts, politics, and the social sciences. That intellectual conflict between certainty and skepticism became the thematic seed for The Hand of the Sun King.
So these three things—a Ged-esque arrogant protagonist, a setting based on Chinese gardens, and a thematic interest in problematizing or undermining certainty—started resonating in my head. There were some obvious connections. An arrogant protagonist could, of course, be humbled by undermining their certainty. Walled gardens designed to mimic the natural world easily become an extended metaphor for the way that rigid intellectual traditions can create an extremely attractive model of reality, but one which is, like a garden, overly simplified and incomplete (in fact the Qing dynasty era author Cao Xueqin did something similar in his classic novel Dream of the Red Chamber, which is sometimes titled Story of the Stone in English).
The last piece of the puzzle slotted into place when I was revisiting some books I had read for a class on postcolonial theory, including Benedict Anderson’s IMAGINED COMMUNITIES and Edward Said’s ORIENTALISM, and the idea to make the protagonist a member of a colonized people who is himself sent to enforce imperial rule onto a different colony settled in my mind.
Once all those ideas started smashing into one another in my brain, it wasn’t long until I had the basic concept for a story. Originally it was just a short story (really a long novelette) about an arrogant young imperial sorcerer who lived in a garden in the middle of a colonized city who upon leaving the garden came to sympathize with the colonized people. The novelette version of it won a quarterly first place in Writers of the Future, which got me thinking that I could do a lot more with this protagonist. Next thing I knew, I was writing about Alder following his grandmother out into the forest to visit the Temple of the Flame.
Amazing cover. How much input did you have, and what did you feel like when you saw it for the first time?
Thank you! It really is spectacular, isn’t it? Patrick Knowles did a great job with a very simple idea I supplied to Gollancz and turned it into something amazing. Once we finished with edits, my editor asked me for any ideas I might have for the cover. I came back to him with something about a hand with the title on the palm and maybe a rising sun behind it and a landscape in the background. Patrick took that and turned it into three really amazing sketches, which my editor sent back to me. Fortunately my editor, my agent, and I all loved the same sketch, and that became the final cover.
I’m sure that seeing cover art for your first novel is always a mixture of nervousness and excitement. What if it feels too generic? Or fails to represent the book well? Or follows some design philosophy that you find either boring or garish? The first thing I felt when I saw Patrick’s sketches was an immediate release of all that nervous tension. Regardless of which sketch turned into the final cover, I knew it was going to be beautiful, intricate, and in the spirit of the novel. Seeing the final version of the art was a step beyond that. I probably spent half an hour looking at all the little details in the palm of the hand and marvelling at how many subtle references to characters and moments in the book there were. I couldn’t wait to show everyone I knew, and it was an agonizing wait until the cover reveal.
Which, incidentally, I’m currently enduring once again while I wait for the go-ahead to start showing off the covers for the second book! There will be different US and UK covers this time, but they both look fantastic, and I had quite a bit of input into both of them.
There are a number of different cultures in the book, and all are distinct. Was this important to you?
This was very important to me. Studying history, it becomes clear that monoculture is a myth. Cultures are constantly overlapping and interacting, and it’s frustrating for me when fantasy worlds include at most two or three distinct cultures, and each of those cultures feels extremely singular and unified. The Sienese Empire in THE HAND OF THE SUN KING is a patchwork at two levels. First, it was a collection of small kingdoms not that long ago until the emperor unified them and imposed his doctrine. There are still vestiges of those old cultures, but they’re fairly subtle (and honestly not particularly prevalent in the first book, though a bit more so in the second).
But secondly, like all empires, Sien has been expanding to conquer its neighbors, and those neighbors have their own cultural identities which Sien is very interested in suppressing. Empires are interested in domination, not only through physical violence but through control of culture. Think of the Christianization of Native American children, as an example. Taiwan still struggles with this to some extent. During Japanese occupation at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century there was compulsory education in the Japanese language, and there are still lots of elderly people in Taiwan who primarily speak Japanese. To this day the two major political parties are often in conflict over how to balance language education, sometimes compelling Mandarin education, sometimes prohibiting it until high school, sometimes subsidizing English as a Second Language for kindergartens, other times prohibiting them.
I think evil empires in fiction are often obviously evil in their physical cruelty and brutality, but I wanted to write an empire that was as much, if not more detestable for its project of cultural domination. Sien doesn’t only destroy lives, it reduces the vibrancy of the world by forcing everything it conquers to mirror itself, and in order to capture that I needed to show that vibrancy. It’s an interesting and important thing for me to think about as someone working in education as a teacher and in entertainment as a writer in what has been for almost a century the most culturally dominant nation on the planet.
You’ve written a great book about an empire subsuming all others into its control, yet there is a thread that maybe, just maybe, they aren’t the bad guys?
This is a tricky question to answer, because it tiptoes right on the edge of spoilers for the second and third books. They’re definitely, at this point, the bad guys, but I will say that the emperor of Sien clearly has reasons he wanted to make an empire, and they’re very similar to the reasons people might want to live in one. He lived in a very chaotic world under constant threat, and the easiest way to try and control that chaos and strike back against that threat was to create something to rival it in scope and power. An empire is ultimately an attempt to control the world, isn’t it? It isn’t that hard for me to think of good reasons why someone might want to control the world, particularly if they think they understand how to make it safe and productive while controlling it. But what is the cost of that control? And what if there’s a better, albeit harder and somewhat more uncomfortable way to achieve the same ends?
In thinking about this question I can’t stop thinking about the United States and our enormous military, in terms of not only budget and size but presence and level of activity in world affairs. Americans tend to be able to justify that military, don’t we? Yet maintaining it consumes resources that might be put to better use lifting children out of poverty and providing medical and education to our citizens, and using it often means destroying lives and societies for the sake of protecting our national interests and security.
Is the United States maybe, just maybe, not the bad guys? Or might Sien’s goals be less relevant than the terrible methods used to achieve them?
Morality, certainly of the main character and main supporting cast, is grey. What can you tell us about striking this balance throughout?
Well, I’ve always been a bit of a moral skeptic. I grew up in a very traditional, conservative environment, but I was aware from an early age of a significant level of hypocrisy. I knew good people who did bad things and bad people who did good things, and a whole lot of people who just did what made sense to them and justified it as “good” post-facto. One of my focuses in college was on ethics because I was really, really hoping I would be able to find an ethical system or theory that felt complete and compelling to me. I didn’t find one, though I did find a lot of very interesting ways to think about morality and to classify my own moral failings, haha.
It gets even harder to make moral judgments when you start talking about wars and international conflicts and things like that. There’s a phrase I’ve heard but don’t think I’ve ever seen attributed, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” and historically this has often been true. Empires like to brand the people who resist them as terrorists or bandits or brigands or what have you, and sometimes people who are only interested in their own power latch on to resistance movements as a way to potentially rise up in the world. Depending on who is telling the story the morality of the situation will change.
A lot of the time “grey morality” in fiction comes about because characters are pursuing noble ends with questionable means, or because they’re pursuing selfish ends. I think that’s fine, but I think it’s more interesting to tell stories about conflicts between people who all think they’re doing the right thing. No one in THE HAND OF THE SUN KING is evil just for the sake of being evil. They all serve some higher cause, whether it’s the liberation of a homeland or the establishment of an eternal empire that will bring harmony and peace to the world. Some characters are a bit crueler in their personalities, some are a bit more noble, but they could all be heroes or villains depending on your lens. What I think is particularly interesting is to tell this sort of story through the lens of a character whose attitude about the conflict changes, which is something I tried to do with Alder, so you get one person’s take but from two different lenses. That heightens the sense of grey morality, I think, in that Alder’s own sense of morality isn’t fixed. He has his own selfish motivations, and he also has a sense of moral duty that changes as he learns more about the world.
As far as how hard it was to balance, it wasn’t particularly difficult. Like I said earlier, I tried to give every character sympathetic or at least comprehensible reasons for doing what they were doing and believing what they believed, and then I put those beliefs and goals in opposition to one another to create conflict.
The story is told in the first person. What made you choose this approach?
The story is very much about Alder’s perspective on his world. It’s possible to tell that kind of story in third person, but I find it easier in first person for some reason. I also wanted to create a sense that Alder is not just experiencing these events, but relating them to the audience at some later point, to highlight the fact that we are at no point getting a truly objective account of what’s going on here. We’re getting Alder’s version, his explanation for his actions and attitudes, which I think heightens the reader’s awareness of how and why Alder’s attitudes change. At least I hope it does, haha.
The magic system(s) in the book are each different. How did you come up with each of them?
Well, there’s only one magic system, technically, just like there’s only one set of physical laws in the real world. There are, however, many different ways to conceptualize and manipulate those physical laws depending on what you’re trying to accomplish. Similarly, there are a few different ways of interacting with magic in THE HAND OF THE SUN KING—pact magic (like witchcraft), sorcery, and magic of the old sort—but they are all, at the end of the day, the same thing, just constrained (or not) in different ways for different reasons. It’s all very postmodern, haha.
Beyond that, I don’t really want to explain what’s going on in terms of the magic systems themselves, or how I came up with them, because the next two books will continue to reveal deeper layers of how all these things work. As far as how I came up with them, the actual things the magic does (like shapeshifting, shooting lightning, healing people, calling the wind, etc.) were just things I thought it would be cool for magic to be able to do. I then categorized those things magic does into groups that felt interesting or somehow consistent together, then assigned those groups to different cultures in the world, and let the assigned magic of each culture help me further design the culture itself.
The one exception to this was Sien, which only has one magic, which was always imperial magic in my mind because it’s the magic that facilitates the imperial project both in terms of establishing a massive communications network and in terms of allowing the empire to absorb and control the magic of the conquered.
What do you normally read; a diehard fantasy only fan, or do you mix it up? What are you reading at the moment and what are you looking forward to?
I read a mix of things, though fantasy has always dominated, with science fiction in second place, except for a stint in high school where I got really into horror novels and a later stint in college where I decided I hadn’t read enough classics. I also try to read a healthy amount of nonfiction, particularly in history, anthropology, and philosophy, though less and less philosophy these days. Maybe I should change that!
Right now I’m reading A CROWN OF SWORDS by Robert Jordan as part of a somewhat spontaneous re-read of the Wheel of Time after watching the first season of the TV show. Once I finish it I’m going to take a break from the WoT reread for AGE OF ASH by Daniel Abraham, which I’ve been told by many reliable sources is absolutely fantastic.
During my last WoT break I read A COUNTRY OF GHOSTS by Margaret Killjoy which was very good, and very interesting. Other books I’m really looking forward to that are out or coming soon are MOON WITCH, SPIDER KING by Marlon James, THE SPEAR CUTS THROUGH WATER by Simon Jimenez, and the as-yet-untitled third book in M. A. Carrick’s Rook and Rose trilogy. A really good book I’ve already read in ARC form that everyone should be looking forward to is FLAMES OF MIRA by Clay Harmon.
Do you have a writing process? Planner or pantser?
I’m a plontser. I have entirely pantsed most of the short stories I’ve had published. For novels, I tend to have a character concept, a thematic concept, a well developed setting, plus an ending, a climax, and three or four steps between the beginning and the climax figured out, but none of the connective narrative tissue. Then I start writing from the beginning and write straight through to the end. As I write, though, I jot down lots of notes and ideas as they come to me. Also, in multi-pov books I sometimes write a single pov character from the beginning to the end of the book to start, and then interleave the other povs afterward.
This is a process that has produced two really good books (at least in my opinion!) but which relies on a lot of revision. I had to rewrite over half of THE GARDEN OF EMPIRE, the second Pact & Pattern book, from the first draft to the second. This is stressful for me now that I have deadlines, and so I’m trying a slightly more notes-heavy approach to book three to try and head off problems before they wind up breaking an entire draft and requiring a rewrite.
What’s next? The next book in the series, writing something else?
THE GARDEN OF EMPIRE, the sequel to THE HAND OF THE SUN KING, is basically finished! We just have the copyedit left to do, and then it should be ready to go for its August 2022 release.
Right now I’m writing the third book in the series, which does not have an official title yet. But also I’m brainstorming out a different setting and a couple of possible stories to tell in it. If you’re curious about what that might look like, you could read my short story “The Gwyddien and the Raven Fiend” in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, which is sort of forming the initial foundation of the next book I’m hoping to write. Though, of course, there’s no guarantee it’s the next book I’ll get to write, since the concept for it might turn out to be unsellable or bad!
Such is the writer’s life.
If you could collaborate with any other author; who would it be and why?
Oof, I don’t know. I think I would make a very bad collaborator in some ways. I tend to be very controlling of creative projects, and I’ll get weird ideas and run with them to the point where I’ve ceased entirely to work on the original idea. But it would be very, very fun to do something like what Steven Erikson and Ian C. Esselmont are doing with the Malazan world, essentially having two authors write their own books in the same setting with a few overlapping characters and story arcs. If Marie Brennan was ever interested in letting anyone else play around in her Driftwood setting doing something like that, I would be enthusiastically on board.
Which book did you wish you’d written? Why?
Every once in a while I read something that is so good it’s painful. I become consumed with envy and despair at every being able to write something as good as what I’ve just read, or even worthy of being sold on the same bookstore shelf. Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series had that effect most powerfully and most recently. It’s the kind of thing I hope to someday be capable of writing—enormous and intricate, strange and fascinating, gripping, thrilling, and rich. It’s less that I wish I had written Terra Ignota, and more that I wish I were a skilled enough (or confident enough) writer to strive for and successfully create the kind of world and story Palmer has created.
What TV shows do you find inspirational or recommend?
I think more SFF fans should watch the German TV show DARK, which is on Netflix. It’s strange and trippy and incredibly well done.
I recently rewatched the first season of TRUE DETECTIVE, which is inspirational for me as an example of a story that deals with really complicated philosophical themes in a pretty accessible way, which is often what I’m trying to do.
For a fantasy pick, I thought ARCANE by studio Fortiche for Netflix was outstanding in just about every way. Very compelling writing, great characters, and a really interesting world. If you’d told me ten years ago my favorite show to come out in 2021 would be an adaptation of League of Legends I would have refused to believe you despite whatever evidence you brought back in your time machine, but here we are!
What has been your favourite film/game?
My favorite movies I saw last year were THE GREEN KNIGHT and THE LAST DUEL, which are both extremely good medieval films that seemed to fizzle out completely. They both deserved more attention from the SFF fandom for their costume and set design alone, but they’re also really good fantasy/medieval films with great stories and characters. The kinds of films I wish would be made more often, but which never seem to make enough money to justify their own existence to Hollywood. A close runner up was DUNE, which I think was as good of an adaptation of its source material as we’re ever likely to get. My favorite movies of all time are the LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy, but that’s because they’re the greatest movies of all time.
I think the most fun and interesting game I’ve played recently was DISCO ELYSIUM, which is like if David Lynch made a dialog-driven role-playing game set in post-soviet Eastern Europe. It’s very weird and very good! For a more conventional answer, I’ve played through The Witcher 3 and Persona 5 twice each, and I don’t usually replay hundred hour long role playing games, so I must like them a lot.
Thanks for the great questions!
Thanks again to J. T. for taking the time to talk with us. And now you should be clued in, excited, and ready to pick up The Hand of the Sun King and get yourself ready for the sequel this summer!
You can learn more about The Hand of the Sun King and the author’s other works on his website and follow him on Twitter and Instagram!
Jennie Ivins