Author Interview: Christopher Ruocchio
- Zach Harney
- 4 days ago
- 11 min read
On the eve of the release of Shadows Upon Time, the final installment in Christopher Ruocchio’s acclaimed Sun Eater series, the author joins us to reflect on the journey that began with Empire of Silence and grew into a sweeping epic. With the story of Hadrian Marlowe reaching its long-awaited conclusion, Ruocchio talks about his start as an author, the challenge of ending a universe that has captivated readers for nearly a decade, and what comes next after Sun Eater's conclusion. We are so grateful for Christopher's generosity and willingness to share his story behind one of the most captivating SFF epics of the last decade.
1. You started writing your first series in your early 20s and have created an incredibly mature work at such a young age. When did you first start formulating The Sun Eater story and what were some of the pivotal moments from inception to getting the first book published?
I started trying to write stories as young as 8, and started pursuing writing seriously maybe a little after that. I was 10 when Eragon came out, and I remember being really excited to realize that Christopher Paolini wasn’t that much older than I was (I had previously assumed great age was a requirement for publication, being a child). I’ve written continuously ever since. I finished something like a short novel in middle school, and continued to rewrite and rework ideas since I completed that first work. I was always working on the same project, and although it began as something totally different, it evolved by stages until it became The Sun Eater. There are little tiny pieces—character names, individual scenes—which I have had with me for twenty years and more, although the context and nature of these things have changed tremendously over the years.
2. There have been a lot of comparisons of your writing to different authors, such as Frank Herbert, Gene Wolfe, and other more modern science fiction and fantasy writers. Who were some of your greatest literary influences early in your life and how did you set out to navigate the treacherous waters of inspiration versus emulation?
Herbert and Wolfe are certainly my two largest influences insofar as science fiction is concerned, but I owe as much or more to Tolkien, as it was Middle-earth that took me from a casual reader to quite a serious one. I also consider myself hugely influenced by other media. Film, certainly, and video games in particular. I grew up on a number of JRPG games: Baten Kaitos, Lost Odyssey, and the Tales series (I was never a big Final Fantasy guy).
Regarding inspiration versus emulation, my critics will, of course, tell you that I have not navigated those waters at all, and I understand where they are coming from. My intent—let’s use Dune as an example here, for my setting resembles Dune’s in several superficial ways—was to bring my text closer to some of these older, more famous works, so that I could set up my series thematically in argument with the other works. Dune, famously, is intended as a critique of charismatic leaders (and I think it completely fails to do so), but the notion that a charismatic leader or a hero is intrinsically dangerous always struck me as a shallow and frankly naïve message. Heroes compel people, necessarily. One need look no further than the plethora of Dune’s own readers who “misunderstand” the book’s message. Paul is compelling. He is also intensely likeable, in that first book, and deeply sympathetic. The Harkonnens are utterly depraved and unredeemable. Dune is very black and white, actually, it only pretends at grayness. Heroes, it seems to me, are an inevitable feature of the human landscape. What do we do about that? That seems a more meaningful question to explore than the simple warning in Dune.
Anyway, I felt it was necessary to bring my text nearer Dune in certain ways so my readers would come to see that I was really writing…not a Dune clone, but a Dune critique. A friendly critique. I love Dune. I just think Herbert misses the mark on this point somewhat entirely. Charismatic leaders can be dangerous—Herbert doubtless had Hitler in mind—but was Churchill not charismatic? Charisma, greatness, heroism—call it what you will—is a morally neutral quality, and we have in all of us equal parts evil and divine.
But I rather fear that I didn’t set up the parameters clearly enough, especially in the early books. It was a risky game, and if people feel I have stolen too much and borrowed too little, that’s okay.
3. I don’t know if I’ve ever read a series that is so expansive, yet so hyper-focused on the progression and transformation of a single individual. Hadrian Marlowe’s narrative voice is intensely intimate. What challenges did you face writing in first-person with a story of this scope?
I never felt challenged by this at all, really. I think it was really a blessing, as I was spared the need to coordinate timelines across multiple POVs, or debate how much to show of X or Y. Really, I think it made my life easier, not harder.
Mind you, it can make battles a bit tough. With a wider lens, I might have been able to scope the conflict out more, but I do think there’s something special about the keyhole perspective we get following just Hadrian so closely.
4. While the entire series is very intimate, there are also some really big questions that drive the narrative around the nature of the universe and our place in it, the role of individuals amidst empires, the morality of power and memory. What drew you to tackle some of these ideas in your writing?
They seem to me to be the only questions worth asking, artistically speaking, at any rate. There was never really any thought or consideration given to it. I just sort of naturally went in these directions, and even now I struggle to answer the question because…well, isn’t attempting to answer these questions what art is about?
5. There’s a strong undercurrent of classical history and philosophy in your writing, and you even include callbacks to figures we would recognize in our own history. What role did the ancient world and its thinkers play in your storytelling?
I’ve always been drawn to the classical and medieval world. Possibly, it was my early Catholic education. I don’t know. The joke is that every boy is assigned either World War II or the Roman Empire at the age of 10, and I was assigned Rome. There was a meme a year or two ago in which women were asking their boyfriends/husbands how often they think about Rome, and my wife didn’t even bother. As for The Sun Eater, I find that most science fiction breaks quite sharply with the past to build whatever future the author is trying to build. I didn’t want to do that. It really bothers me how little of the past survives in the settings of, say, Star Trek or Dune. It seems to me that this is just a mistake. The present is intimately connected with the past, and I see no reason for that to change in the future, it being only a later present and all. People sometimes criticize my work, saying “No one will read Aristotle in 20,000 years!” But we read him 2000 years later, which seems to me a very good start. Just because no one will read me in 2000 years doesn’t mean they won’t read Tolkien. I wanted to create a future intimately connected to our past, to really highlight for my readers the fact that this—the world of The Sun Eater—is our future. It’s not a galaxy far, far away. Hadrian’s story is our story. His world is our world.
6. As an editor yourself, how do you separate your editorial instincts from your creative impulses when working on your own novels? How has that industry perspective shaped your path as an author?
You can’t look back, not until you’re out. Just like Orpheus. Revising is like the biggest pit prospective writers fall into. You can polish a first chapter until it’s all worn away and never finish a book, if you want…but you can’t make it right until you’ve done the last chapter. You can’t really edit until you have eyes on the whole work, and you just have to finish first.
In truth, it’s really quite easy for me to separate the editor from the writer. The truth is that I hate editing. I worked as an editor for seven years, but ‘editor’ sometimes just means ‘publishing employee,’ and while I did plenty of editorial work, it was my least favorite part of the job. So it’s easy for me to put it off. I don’t usually do anything more intense than spot corrections until the draft is done, and just make notes for when I do have to circle back.
While my time in publishing did not seriously impact my creative process, it did give me a lot of insight into the publishing industry from the business end of things. Just how things work, why things are the way they are, what to be wary of in contracts—that sort of thing. I hope all that has made me better at all the parts of my job that surround the writing…parts which are, unfortunately, just as important (if not more important) than the writing itself.
7. If you weren’t writing science fiction, what other genres might you want to explore? Do you have any ideas for series outside of the world of SFF?
The truth is that I really think of myself as a fantasy writer. I know I’ll be slagged for saying so, but science fiction seems to me only a species of fantasy anyway, but I think I’ve a certain romantic sensibility that better aligns with the looking-to-the-past nature of most fantasy. The world of The Sun Eater is one deeply and intimately connected with our own history (and our present, it must be said). The institutions of my far future resemble those of our distant past. My intention with this was to create a sense of continuity to all human experience, to create a human future, not one of those abstract post-human sci-fi settings that I find utterly unreadable…but to circle back to the actual question, I have no intention of ever leaving the fantasy genre (science fiction included). Fantasy is, to me, the realest and most fundamental literature. In fantasy, we grapple with the symbolic nature of reality most concretely. I always like to talk about the young Tolkien’s trip to see Macbeth, and his disappointment that Birnam Wood does not literally come to Dunsinane Hill, and how much better it would have been if the trees themselves moved. In fantasy, the dragon is literal, not a metaphor. There’s an honesty and directness of human experience in that you don’t get with what Homer Simpson calls stupid reality. We do fight dragons, actually, all of us. We’ve all dated a vampire, or tried to rescue someone from one. Fantasy helps us see this clearly. Why would I write anything lesser?
8. You are clearly not afraid to let even beloved characters meet their demise in your stories. Is it hard to let a character go after writing and developing them for so long, or does the story solely drive the character’s fate as opposed to your attachment or enjoyment when writing them?
No, no, it’s not hard for me to kill someone. What is hard is coping with the worry that I have not permitted them to die well, or rightly. I take character death pretty seriously because death is pretty serious. I lose a great deal of sleep over whether or not I have respected the character in those final, crucial moments…respected the drama of those moments. I really don’t want to waste my readers’ time, or their hearts.
As for my own attachment…I don’t know. The characters feel no more or less real or gone to me once I have killed them off. I can always return and tell other stories with them, earlier in their lives. But I am always conscious of the fact that I have created these characters. They are my ideas, and so they’re still not really dead to me, because I think about them.
9. Even from the beginning of The Sun Eater series, the reader has been told how the story will end, at least in broad strokes. These brief moments of foreshadowing continued throughout the story, even giving glimpses of certain characters’ futures well in advance. What made you choose this storytelling device and were you afraid at all that it might be something that lessened the tension or the stakes?
For some readers, it does lessen the tension and the stakes—but those people aren’t my concern. We have come to treat literature very disposably. Most readers, I’d warrant, read a book just once and move on to the next narrative. They are grazers, scavengers, even. They will read my books once—maybe love them, maybe not—and that’s fine. But I don’t write for those readers, not really. I write for those readers who will most treasure what I have written, even if that audience is literally just myself. By telling you something of the ending, I take away some of the tension with regard to what happens, yes. I reduce the book’s page-turning quality. But for the right reader, this triggers them to read differently, intentionally…it makes them sit with Hadrian in each moment of his journey. That’s a different—and I think a better—way to read. It’s how you read when you re-read, and re-reads are always better. If I can get you halfway to re-reading on your first read, all the better, I say.
10. We are very close to the release of the final book in The Sun Eater series, Shadows Upon Time, and readers are extremely excited to find out how this saga ends. We all know that one of the most difficult things to do as an author is to write a worthy ending to a beloved series. As you approached writing the final book, what were the driving factors that determined how you chose to end it and what do you hope people will feel after finishing the series?
I want people to love it, obviously, but more than that, I want them to sit with it. I hope I have written an ending that lasts long after the book has closed, and that encourages readers to return…for my next work, of course, but to Empire of Silence and the start of the journey again and again. I want The Sun Eater to enter readers’ regular rotation, and I hope they find re-reading it more rewarding and not less. As for concerns, again, my primary concern was that I have not wasted my readers’ time. Life is short, books are long—and so a book had rather be worth reading. Naturally, I was concerned with wrapping up certain story arcs and finishing the tales of individual characters. But I was as concerned with what things to abandon, leave open, or leave unfinished. History has no ending—not yet—and so neither should a fantasy. But at the same time, things end every day, more things than any of us can really imagine. I wanted to reflect that, let’s say. I hope I’ve done the right thing. We’ll know soon.
11. Are there stories left to tell within the world of Sun Eater, or do you feel like the series is complete in your eyes?
Nothing is ever complete, let’s say. I plan to return, but not for some time.
12. With the Sun Eater series completed, do you already have ideas in place for your next project? Can you give us a glimpse of what we can expect?
I have, in fact, already outlined the first novel of my new trilogy. I had hoped to deliver it by the end of this year, but fate intervened and I am delayed. Of the new trilogy, I can say only this: it is not Sun Eater. It is not tied to Sun Eater in any way whatsoever. It is fantasy. Old-school fantasy. You’ll probably see it in AD 2027.
This interview was done in a series of communications back and forth and I want to give a special thanks to Christopher who was so gracious to participate in this interview. If you want to get more information on his books and latest news, you can also follow him on Instagram or check out his website.
Interview by: Zach Harney, co-founder of the Collectible Book Vault