The Big Idea: Bradley Beaulieu

Posted on September 4, 2015    Posted by John Scalzi      7 Comments

If there’s a way to encapsulate the thoughts of Bradley Beaulieu with regard to his new novel Twelve Kings in Sharakhai, they might be: “Dying is easy. Tragedy is hard.” Learn what this means below.

BRADLEY BEAULIEU:
Years ago, like any new writer, I was working through ways I might portray tragedy and loss in my stories. Strengthening new muscles, as it were. To the young writer it may seem as though death itself is the ultimate tragedy, but it doesn’t take long to figure out that the actual death isn’t what matters most. It’s the grief left behind, the feelings of loss and impotence and anger. What death leaves in its wake matters so much more than the death itself.

Like a prick from a dirty needle, tragedy can infect the tissue surrounding it, and this got me to thinking. What other types of loss might have the most impact on a reader? Like ticking off topics on a list, my mind worked through the most obvious. Betrayal. Personal failure. Drifting slowly but surely apart from someone you love. Robbing a child of the potential to be great.

Like so many, I’ve been affected by the events of 9/11, the War in Afghanistan, the Iraq War, Arab Spring, the civil uprisings in Syria, and on and on. Society marches forward or backward on those events. They are the hinges of our history. But I cannot think of those larger events without also thinking of the terrible human loss wrapped inside them. I’m fully aware that I’ve grown up in a place where my way of life is protected. I can only wonder what it would be like to live in a place where so much that I take for granted is threatened.

That, in a nutshell, is what I wanted to explore in Twelve Kings, not merely individual or personal loss, but familial loss, societal loss, cultural loss. What grows in soil sown with so much grief? What pain might that new growth lead to? Are there things that might be saved even in terrible tragedy? Things that might be reborn? Is there joy to be found?

When I was first embarking on Twelve Kings in Sharakhai, I had already decided it would be set in a vast desert, that there would be wandering tribes who sail every corner of the desert on sandships, that there would be a melting-pot metropolis ruled by twelve cruel kings. I also knew it was going to be a series, and I wanted a through-line to help guide me toward the end of the first book and beyond. I didn’t want it to be about only big canvas stuff, though. I wanted the larger events to be felt in a such a way that it speaks to the things we all share. Something recognizably human. I wanted, in other words, to marry the the broader, earth-shaking events with deeply personal ones.

The main character in Twelve Kings is a woman named Çeda. She loses her mother at a young age when she’s killed in vicious fashion by the twelve immortal kings of Sharakhai. Çeda vows revenge, but revenge is a short-lived thing if not fueled. Years later, now a pit fighter in Sharakhai’s seedy west end, Çeda finds that fuel in the form of riddles hidden in the book of poems her mother left her. They open the door to much larger secrets, secrets the kings tried to bury on the fateful night long ago when they made a dark bargain with the gods of the desert to secure their power. Their desperation to keep those secrets hidden gives hint to just how terrible that bargain was. And yet the kings have had centuries in which to alter history. It won’t be easy for Çeda to uncover the truth.

As the story moves on, Çeda’s initial thirst for revenge is replaced by a desire to uncover what was lost, and in this I finally felt like I’d found what I was looking for. Çeda’s hopes and fears became very personal for me in the writing of this tale, but I also broadened the lens to give some sense of scope to the things she’s playing with. It made the story so much brighter for me, and I hope it does for you too.

Twelve Kings in Sharakhai: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt (pdf link). Visit the author’s site. Follow him on Twitter.