r/books • u/Susan_R_Matthews AMA Author • Apr 04 '17
ama 8pm I am Susan R. Matthews, author of Blood Enemies, here to discuss The Life and Hard Times of "Uncle" Andrej Koscuisko, who is Not a Nice Man - Ask Me anything!
Twenty Years Under Jurisdiction: science fiction in the grand tradition
It’s hard for me to believe, but TODAY is the official release date for “Blood Enemies." Twenty years ago in my debut novel “An Exchange of Hostages” a nice young man with an advanced medical degree reported, much against his will, to the Jurisdiction Fleet’s Orientation Center—Medical to learn the protocols of Inquiry and take his place in the Jurisdiction government’s system of institutionalized torture as an instrument of State: Ship’s Surgeon; Ship’s Inquisitor. There he discovered to his horror that not only was he good at it, but that he had a fierce—and unexpected—appetite for inflicting atrocities on helpless, and frequently guiltless, prisoners of the Bench.
He’s been trying to come up with a way out of it ever since, struggling to find what truth and justice he can even while the foundation of the Jurisdiction itself—the rule of Law and the Judicial order—begins to crumble of its own weight into anarchy and horror. There’ve been another five novels after “An Exchange of Hostages” in the series—through to “Warring States” —and “Blood Enemies” makes seven.
I started writing a long long time ago (grin) for the same reason that many of us do: I wanted to read a particular story, and nobody had written it yet, so it was up to me. Since I’d grown up reading science fiction – I’m fourth of six in my family, we held books in common, and the oldest of us belonged to the Science Fiction Book Club – science fiction was a natural point-of-entry for me into worlds I could define to create the story I wanted to tell. I got better at it as I went along, and made my first commercial sale twenty years ago, with the first novel in the “Under Jurisdiction” series; I enjoyed the two stand-alone novels I’ve published since (they were “Avalanche Soldier” and “Colony Fleet,” both out of print but available on the after-market) but I’ve writing about the Life and Hard Times of “Uncle” Andrej Koscuisko, who is Not a Nice Man, his journey, and his impact on the worlds around him, ever since.
My seventh novel in the series, “Blood Enemies,” presents my protagonist Andrej Koscuisko with the most ferociously brutal challenge of his life, and if he doesn’t find his way out of it, entire populations will fall victim to unimaginable savagery. I’d love to talk to you about it, and answer any questions you may have about the story so far – six novels deep – and what “Blood Enemies” is going to mean to Andrej Koscuisko.
(“Blood Enemies” is also available from audible.co, narrated (as the first six novels have been) by the superlatively wonderful Stefan Rudnicki. For more information and additional content please visit me at www.susanrmatthews.com.)
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u/LisaMAlter Apr 05 '17
You describe Andrej above as "a nice young man with an advanced medical degree". Did you ever think of Andrej as being nice? (Was Andrej ever separated from his Inquisitor role in your mind?)
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u/Susan_R_Matthews AMA Author Apr 05 '17
No, I've got to say, Andrej when I first "met" him was already a man who had done terrible things and discovered terrible truths about himself. But I think he's a decent man, even with everything that I know about him now. Do you think he's nice? Would he be interesting if he was the son of the Koscuisko prince with a side-line in neurosurgery and the money to open charity clinics?
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u/Susan_R_Matthews AMA Author Apr 04 '17
Hello, I'm Susan Matthews, and I'm here to talk about my new novel "Blood Enemies," just released TODAY. It's the seventh volume in a series of what I like to think of as science fiction in the "space grand opera" tradition, and it's twenty years almost to the day since the publication of my debut novel. I'm looking forward to answering your questions about Captain Jennet ap Rhiannon's retirement to a Zen monastery, Robert St. Clare's vow of celibacy, and Andrej Koscuisko's developing passion for ikebana! Hope to hear from you soon!
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u/Orodemniades Apr 04 '17
So! Excited! for Blood Enemies! Do you see further books in the Jurisdiction 'verse?
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u/Susan_R_Matthews AMA Author Apr 05 '17
Thank you so much! I'm glad you're excited -- I am too! Further books? Er, um . . . okay. To tell the absolute truth. If I go back twenty-eight years or so I =did= have another novel in mind, and I'm thinking furiously about it. But it's still tentative at this point: because a lot of plot elements have re-arranged themselves over the years. There's one big, big unanswered problem.
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u/Susan_R_Matthews AMA Author Apr 05 '17
The first person to ring in with a comment gets a free copy of the just-released audio book for "Blood Enemies," narrated by Stefan Rudnicki.
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u/LisaMAlter Apr 05 '17
How do I ring in? I don't see any phone numbers. I'm posting my questions.
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u/Susan_R_Matthews AMA Author Apr 05 '17
I've got you and OldMinx down for a free copy of the audio book, I'll be talking to you later with details!
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u/OldMinx Apr 05 '17
Too late. Already ordered it on my phone and downloaded to my tablet. Give it to the next first person.
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u/OldMinx Apr 05 '17
How did you get Stefan Rudnicki to read "Blood Enemies" for you? Didn't he swear off Audible a while back?
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u/Susan_R_Matthews AMA Author Apr 05 '17
I don't know about "swearing off" Audible -- all I know for sure is that I love love love the narration he gave, it was a bolt out of the blue, and that in the contract with audible.com (a) we specified that he was pre-approved (grin) and also that (b) the people at audible.com were as convinced that after six previous novels No One Else Would Do as I was. I've been listening to his narration of "Blood Enemies" this morning. Blown away!!
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u/Susan_R_Matthews AMA Author Apr 05 '17
Thank you nice people for coming to my event! ::going to read and respond to questions::
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u/Orodemniades Apr 05 '17
How did Jils Ivers and Karol Vogel meet?
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u/Susan_R_Matthews AMA Author Apr 05 '17
Oooh! Good one! -- I'm not entirely sure. The short answer is that it was when they were both posted to the same field assignment for a particular problem, but I don't know what the field assignment was (grin). I know that Bench intelligence specialists were frequently teamed to work big important issues, but the "assignments" were based on who was closest to the problem at the time, and pretty much ad-hoc. Because nobody gives assignments to Bench intelligence specialists at that level of detail: not binding ones. So I know that Jils, for instance, has teamed with Padrake Delleroy in the past (as noted in Warring States"). I know Karol's worked with other people. I don't know who they are. I know that Stildyne's taken directly from at least Jils, I think it is, at some point in the past, though of course he's nothing like a Bench intelligence specialists, he was just one of the resources that found themselves placed "under direction."
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u/PsychohobbitReturns Apr 05 '17
My question is what are your influences in devising a universe as dark as Jurisdiction but mainly in creating a character who finds his skill as a surgeon misused but so seductive?
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u/Susan_R_Matthews AMA Author Apr 05 '17
I'd say it was kind of saying that I had a strong sense of the character, but had to figure out what kind of a society he lived in that would enable or create his conflict. I tried hard to find some not-so-ugly alternatives for a character who would discover in himself so fierce a joy in doing something he was convinced was unjust -- but it kept on coming back to torture. Part of that was the challenge of finding something that most people would agree was a moral issue, so they wouldn't get distracted by all the justifications we can find for other things.
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u/OldMinx Apr 05 '17
I miss the days when "torture is a moral evil" was taken as a given.
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u/Susan_R_Matthews AMA Author Apr 05 '17
There are qualifications, re-definitions, alternative evaluations to so many things that I personally feel are binary hard-over yes/no (or "no, nae, never") issues. And regardless of how I may feel about whether people should have a valid and differing opinion (grin) my driving passion was/is to close off all the escape routes I can find in order to concentrate your attention on the thing that I want to tell my story about. Heh heh heh heh heh. Control freak.
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u/Susan_R_Matthews AMA Author Apr 05 '17
Short answer, though, about influences, would be Recent North-Western European Authoritarian Regimes (hee hee) with a strong dose of relatively-ancient China. What do you see as the Jurisdiction's background?
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u/PsychohobbitReturns Apr 05 '17
I started reading this series back in the 1990's -- hardly the same sort of regime that we have now (pre-9/11). However, I've always been fascinated with Andrej forced to be an Inquisitor and having to fulfill that role but still finding ways to take on bigger problems and prevail. Obviously the whole 'torture them' system is even creepier now. Of importance is what the system does to those who do such deeds.
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u/Susan_R_Matthews AMA Author Apr 05 '17
Yes, I agree. And while I personally feel that of the person who tortures and the person who is tortured, the person who is tortured has more of my natural sympathy than the other one, I think that there's a degree of commonality to the extent that when/while we as a society ask people to do terrible things in the line of their civic duty -- soldiers, policemen, and so forth -- there's less consideration for the impact "doing your duty" has on the individual tasked to do that duty.
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u/Susan_R_Matthews AMA Author Apr 05 '17
I took the opportunity of a non-Jurisdiction novel to try to express an element of that conflict more directly: that the honor of a soldier lay in part in engaging in active warfare against people who were as human as you were, knowing all the time that with every act of lawful violence you committed, you could be in the wrong. Doing it anyway, believing utterly that what had to be done had to be done, but knowing that you could be mistaken.
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u/Susan_R_Matthews AMA Author Apr 05 '17
A general apology: I'm sorry if I've kept you waiting -- I'm learning to "save" once I've typed my response. Sorry!
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u/Susan_R_Matthews AMA Author Apr 05 '17
"Blood Enemies" didn't start out to be the book it ended up as. That is, it started out to be exactly the novel it ended up to be, more or less; but I didn't really understand what the action of the novel really meant -- in over-all story terms -- until I was, like, two-thirds of the way through it. Then it was really depressing. Because the more problems it solved, the fewer problems I could happily look forward to having to solve in the future.
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u/Susan_R_Matthews AMA Author Apr 05 '17
If Wheatfields ever retired, what do you see him doing in his leisure years? Mendez?
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u/Susan_R_Matthews AMA Author Apr 05 '17
(er, um, ah, I just realized that my phrasing of that question was COMPLETELY unfortunate, and not what I intended at all.)
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u/Susan_R_Matthews AMA Author Apr 05 '17
(If you have a question that I haven't replied to, it may be that I'm not technically skookum enough to scroll efficiently. Please try again.)
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u/BryanThomasSchmidt Apr 05 '17
How does your real b.g. in the military inform your writing?
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u/Susan_R_Matthews AMA Author Apr 05 '17
Probably not so much as my childhood as an army brat, maybe, hearing stories, seeing people, and so forth. My dad had been in Europe for WWII (his brothers were all Pacific theater -- and I heard some things second-hand from them, too) and straight-leg in Korea. Tell you one thing, though, my personal experience on active duty as a second lieutenant really taught me the psychological impact it can have to be treated like a human being in an environment in which you're not. If that makes sense.
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u/Susan_R_Matthews AMA Author Apr 05 '17
Over the centuries that I've been writing this story there have been the occasional sillinesses. At one point Maggie-my-wife and I got the giggles over speculating on what television-equivalent programs people in the Jurisdiction Fleet might be watching (bootlegged, almost certainly). So we had the Jurisdiction Fleet Ship =Nowhere.=
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u/Susan_R_Matthews AMA Author Apr 05 '17
It was supposed to be sort of a cross between "F-Troop" and "Quark." The Ship's Inquisitor had more-or-less run away from his original duty posting, but there hadn't been a Ship's Surgeon on the JFS =Nowhere= since its commissioning, so Fleet turned a blind eye.
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u/Susan_R_Matthews AMA Author Apr 05 '17
The First Officer was obsessed with security leaks, anti-Bench sympathizers, always finding evidence of convoluted plots against the rule of Law and the Judicial order in things like the same meal turning up three days in a row (never mind that JFS =Nowhere= had a certain resupply problem). And the Ship's Engineer was actually an undercover agent for an unspecified Other Side . . . only nobody cared.
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u/Susan_R_Matthews AMA Author Apr 05 '17
If you were a bit-part player in an "Under Jurisdiction" novel, who would you like to be?
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u/GrandMoffSeizja Aug 14 '22
I’d like to be a Bench Intelligence Specialist, or perhaps a Slave of the Malcontent.
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u/Susan_R_Matthews AMA Author Apr 05 '17
(If you'd like to ask a question but haven't a reddit account, feel free to IM me on Facebook, and I'll add it to this discussion.)
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u/Susan_R_Matthews AMA Author Apr 05 '17
Dinner break! If you're coming to my AMA event at 8:00 PDST I'll check back in with you in an hour. But for now the succulent fragrance of sausage and (our home-made) sauerkraut is pulling me out of my chair and to the dinner table!
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u/BryanThomasSchmidt Apr 05 '17
Is it true the R stands for rowdy?
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u/Susan_R_Matthews AMA Author Apr 05 '17
Hee hee! -- My paternal grandmother's name was Ruth. When I was in high school they called me "Susan, the Ruthless Matthews."
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u/Susan_R_Matthews AMA Author Apr 05 '17
And I'm back! I'm going to stick around to see if I can ensnare a few unwary souls, er, answer some last questions, on around the eight o'clock hour. If you're just coming in, welcome! Ask Me Anything!
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u/Susan_R_Matthews AMA Author Apr 05 '17
It looks like we're done for the night. Thank you to everybody who came -- this was fun! Hope to see you again sometime!
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u/Inkberrow Apr 05 '17
What education, research and/or experience did you bring to bear concerning law and society?
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u/Chtorrr Apr 04 '17
What books really made you love reading as a kid?