The following is a guest post by Missy Oveson.
Humanity unsettled earth almost a millennium ago, but the new home of humanity is at war because a woman ascends to the throne. In Johnny Worthen’s new book, Of Kings, Queens and Colonies, the prophet of the United Christian Church supports Prince Brandon in his crusade against Queen Zabel to restore the status quo. The church teaches that man is above woman, and that God rewards you based on your righteousness in wealth. The story uses multiple perspectives to weave the tales of a queen who has to fight for her throne, a prince who wants to be Emperor of the galaxy, the colonists who seek to be free of persecution as they head to a new world, a prophet who is trying to unite the church again, a slave trader turned revolutionist, and a planet settled by divergent thinkers who have been living their way for almost a millennium.
As I read through the book, I really resonated with Millie, a girl who is part of the colonists. She starts the book by taking care of her sick family and never quite fits in with the others of her beliefs. She seems to be ahead of her time in thinking. Between the love she showed for her family, the ways she picked her battles, and the determination she showed through the book, I couldn’t help but root for her. She really helped to bring out the themes of the book as a strong contrast to the Queen Zabel.
Alpin Morgan was also a character I really connected with. As the governor of the colonists, I watched him struggle between his beliefs, his wants, and what he thought was best. His struggles came to a place that reminded me of the disability I struggle with. If you are interested in a further breakdown of this character, check out [my post on it](https://missyoveson.com/alpin-morgan-character-breakdown).
I got to interview Johnny Worthen about this book. I firmly recommend this book, especially to anyone who loves sci-fi. You can find it here.
Missy Oveson: What inspired you to write Of Kings, Queens, and Colonies?
Johnny Worthen: I think every author has within them the dream of writing like this. Having read and adored THE FOUNDATION TRILOGY, THE LORD OF THE RINGS, THE FOUR LORDS OF THE DIAMOND and particularly DUNE, it was a goal in my writing career to step into such epic waters. The idea for a science fiction had thus been percolating for decades. I found my first notes for this particular series dated over twelve years ago. That being said, several currents flowed into this idea to give it momentum and meaning. A driving force was the general dread of modern life, my witnessing the fall of empire and the decline of capitalism. I had an existential desire to investigate the ideas and the origins of where we are today. This was further driven by the haunting call from Ursula K. Le Guin for authors to envision a society beyond capitalism. I’m a big believer that authors can be more than just a mirror of society, that we can tilt our glass forward and shine on to better future. That’s the promise of science fiction, for good or ill, a conception of a possible time to come.
MO: The book includes purgers, people who are part of the church to execute some of those that don’t believe in the dominant religion.. What inspired the creation of purgers in this universe?
JW: My book delves deep into power structures. Race, gender and station are all huge parts of the social order I investigate. This is an order that many people pine for today, one they build in backwards places, and strive to put onto others. It’s a creed of intolerance, status quo and power used to maintain power. In order to keep that structure thriving, a higher authority must be used. Thus the presence of a powerful church. Power without threat is suggestion, so it was natural to give the church a strong arm. The Purgers are akin to the Catholic Inquisition and The Danites of Mormon history, which are the two main sources of the United Christian Church I conceived in the book. There is memory of previous civilizations, lessons from old earth taken or discarded in the new worlds. The “civilized,” chose uniformity of belief and quick destruction of dissent as a key lesson, power for power’s sake. The church, through their soldiers and Purgers, maintain a strict adherence to the hegemony of the hierarchal cast structure and total submission to authority. This is part of the stagnant social structure that, though might have once served to allow the new worlds to survive, has long since passed its usefulness for the species, but not to the dominant power politics. Submission to the social order is higher than the power kings. It is this challenge that sets off the crisis of the book when Enskari put a woman on their throne. The Saved are the people in Coronam that are decided to be Saved by God and therefore worthy to have a place in society.
MO: Do you believe you could be among the saved if you lived in this time period?
JW: The Saved is a flavor of Prosperity Theology, a self congratulatory horror of an idea promulgated by Calvin. It’s the idea that the rich are blessed by God, that their high status and comfort are God’s way of showing favor. Thus the rich are good people and the poor bad, both righteously deserving of their station. I am not a fan of this thinking, as you might have guessed. The Saved in the book are the descendants of lucky or powerful people who just so happened to get on a ship leaving Old Earth. The super powerful built the ships and chose useful people to serve them. As a nice bit of built in guilt and Prosperity Theology specialness, they called themselves Saved. I’d like to think that if I lived on a Civilized World, I would be a rebel, but it wouldn’t be easy. Only now, a millennium after the Unsettling, are new ideas even around.
MO: What made you decide to tell the story from multiple points of view?
JW: I like the multiple POV story. It allows so much more depth and insight than a single protagonist. I write to theme and the vastness of the ideas, space, and story I wanted to tell would allow no other way. There are major characters who never know other major characters exist let alone interact with them. The great powers of the book, the political machination and wars are vast and scary, but the intimate stories on the ground of the “little people” and their huge and resounding impact are more interesting to me. To see all angles of the greater idea required many sets of eyes. At the beginning of each chapter we get a bit of lore or world building that we couldn’t get in the chapters.
MO: What inspired the snippets at the start of each chapter?
JW: This is an homage to DUNE. I’ve used epigrams before, in BEATRYSEL, where I had a lot of background information that couldn’t quite fit into the narrator flow but still needed to be known. Thus, in OF KINGS, QUEENS AND COLONIES, much of the history of the culture is divulged there. There I present the The Unsettling, the mysterious figure of Jareth, the behind the scenes politics and recent tidings that everyone in the book knows but reader need to know too. I also use the space at times for thematic elements. These are my favorites. Foreshadowing happens there, ideas and themes are presented, sometimes only to be dismissed. The epigram about the planets of the system from an elementary school book is one of my favorites. It shows the mystery of the system, suggests a positive inquisitive direction for students to progress and then has the rug pulled out from under it by it having been censored. It shows a society able to learn but choosing not to. Andre Bruin is a Saved man that was illiterate and spent the bulk of his life involved with slave trading until he decided that he needed to repent and free slaves.
MO: Why did you choose for Andre Bruin to know the Christmas Carol out of all works that exist?
JW: Andre Bruin is a powerful figure in the book. Whereas most of the personages are echoed in the 16th Century, Bruin is surely 19th. He shows us that people can change, do change and should change. The reference to Dickens, beyond its sentiment, is another indication that we are not working in a vacuum. Human history is a thing. We have been down this road before, we know where it goes—we should know, in clear hindsight, that we can do better. Saved society has chosen to forget certain things to justify its continued inequality, but it can’t hide it all and little snippets of past culture can still resonate across time and space. Also, Bruin’s recalling of the book is a clue and step to his later enlightenment.
MO: What elements do you feel like you’d most like the readers to resonate with?
JW: Bruin’s line: “How big is your family?” contains the central idea. Who or what do we value enough to help? To fight for? To sacrifice for? Why is it so limited? I would want readers to sympathize and understand that much of the pain in this culture is man-made (pun probably intended). There are enough real problems to test us, selfishness and cruelty don’t need to be heaped upon us besides. We can do things differently and we should try to do things differently. It’s a story about love and sacrifice—the highest love, of sharing to overcome greed and a necessary step for human evolution.
MO: Which character do you root for the most in the story?
JW: By far, my favorite character, the one I root for most, is Millie. Orphaned, female, poor, betrayed, the world is stacked against her. And yet, her suffering and enlightenment through that suffering, shows the path forward. Sir Nolan is another favorite of mine. He acts badly, but his heart is pure. Means and ends play clear with him. He senses the greater need of social evolution, however limited he understands it, and acts with the ruthlessness worthy of his title “spymaster.”
MO: Why did you choose bees to be so important in this book?
JW: Is there a more noble insect in the world than the bee? I think not. But more than that, the bee, as symbol of the eldritch promise of Coronam, comes from the idea of an alien assistant. Also, closer to home and now, the pollinator bee is intricately connected to human survival. Study after study suggests that should that species die off, much of humanity would follow quickly behind it This terrible truth builds upon the idea of the alien assistant and suggests very clearly a connection between all life that is at the heart of my book.