Christopher Ruz is fast becoming one of my favorite indie sci-fi authors. His covers and concepts are great, his prose is very readable, and I’ve really enjoyed every bit of it I’ve read.
My first exposure to him was his short novel Poirot and the Doctor. It’s a story about a cosplaying Tom Baker and a stage actor playing Agatha Christie’s greatest creation, working together to solve the mystery of a lost little girl. It really bowled me over and I’ve been slowly consuming his work ever since.
He released a novel this week and I asked him to tell us about it and him in our Indie Books space.
The book is called Century of Sand, and here’s his blurb about the story:
Richard and Ana are on the run.
As a young soldier, Richard led a rebellion that installed the King’s sociopathic Magician as the new regent. Now, after forty years of watching his comrades vanish into the dungeons of Stonebridge Castle, Richard has fled the kingdom with his mute daughter in tow, escaping into the desert wastes where magic still boils in the clouds and demons walk the dunes inside the bodies of men.
The Magician isn’t far behind, and he’s brought a pet: the Culling, an undead stitched-together tracking dog with a taste for blood. But Richard has his own weapon, stolen from the Magician himself: the calcified heart of a demon, which he hopes to trade back to its original owner in exchange for sanctuary. What he doesn’t know is that his daughter, Ana, is far more valuable than the stone. She was the last piece in the Magician’s grand weapon, and he’ll tear the desert in half to get her back…
And here’s his treatise about who he is and his interest in science fiction and fantasy.
I was raised on fantasy.
When I was six, my parents decided to move from Canberra to Sydney. Shortly after, they realised they’d made a terrible decision, and moved back. We commuted between the cities quite a lot during the selling-buying-selling process, and my Dad would liven up the long trips by playing the BBC radio play adaptation of Lord of the Rings. I was six years old, and instantly entranced.
That said, when I began writing my own fantasy years later, I stayed as far away from Tolkien as I could manage. Why? Because Tolkien surprised and scared me when I first experienced his works, and I when I wrote I wanted to surprise and scare myself. What’s the fun of creating if you’re only retelling?
I’m not accusing fantasy of being a stale genre. There are many fantastic authors pushing the boundaries – Sanderson, Mieville and Wolfe to name a few. But it’s easy to follow the well-worn path. Need a rags-to-riches story? You can’t get more raggedy than a farmboy who becomes a hero. Need to raise the stakes? Threaten the reader with the end of the world. Need some fantasy elements to spice things up? Why not toss in some dwarves and drow?
So when it came time for me to plan Century of Sand, I decided to create something unpredictable. I wrote about Richard, an old man running away from terrible decisions, and Ana, a girl raised in a dungeon, trained to fight but not to speak. I pushed them as far away from the traditional hero archetypes as I could, making them ambiguous and flighty. Save the world? Hell, Richard’s only interested in saving his daughter, and on his bad days he’s only concerned with himself.
I then stepped away from the rolling fields of the shire and created a desert plucked out of Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns, where water is currency and native warlords do battle for patches of land contaminated by ancient demon magic. I filled it with ghosts, beasts and legends, and I dropped my characters in at the deep end. Richard’s no native. He knows how to fight and the basics of alchemy, but he can’t speak the language and he doesn’t know how to avoid the dark places. He’s barely competent as a warrior, let alone as a father.
Finally, I gave them an enemy. The Magician, a man of terrible might and power, who knows his actions are evil but is willing to sacrifice his own soul for the greater good. By his side is the Culling, a manufactured monster built from the corpses of tracking dogs. I set them on Richard and Ana’s path, and I let things unfold.
What followed was three books worth of excitement, action, near misses, nightmare creatures, demons wearing human masks, bizarre desert civilisations, landscapes scarred by magical accidents, and a strange but wonderful relationship father/daughter that emerged in pieces as Richard and Ana travelled the desert. They are the heart of Century of Sand. They need each other not just as a means of surviving the wastes, but as a way of staying sane throughout their long journey to the demon Eluah. They help each other hold on to what little humanity they have left.
I don’t know if they love each other, but I’ve loved writing about them.
Century of Sand is the first book in a fast paced swords-and-sorcery epic, available now on Kindle, with the next two books in the trilogy soon to follow.
I can’t wait to sink my teeth into this book and I’m grateful Mr. Ruz took the time out to talk to us about his book today. Century of Sand is available on the Kindle, print editions, I’m told, are coming soon.