A.Z. Rozkillis is joining us today to talk about her novel, Fractal Terminus. Here’s the publisher’s description:
Jax had been alone on her Station for ten years, and that was the way she liked it. But then came Saunders, and her cheery, cute demeanor was just what was needed to bring Jax back to humanity. Shame the Station underwent a horrifying transformation at the same time.
But hold on, it’s getting weirder! No one is sure where the Station is now, or even in which reality it exists. Find out what might happen, what could happen, and what is so improbably impossible that it probably won’t happen. Probably. It’s like Everything Everywhere, All at Once, but with lesbian horror/comedy in space, in AZ Rozkillis’ next scifi tale, Fractal Terminus!
What’s A.Z’s favorite bit?
I wrote a science-fiction/romance story centered around just two characters. Well, three characters if you include the massive, insentient, hulking form of the Space Station they inhabit. And since my main character, Jax, is low-key in a love triangle with her only coworker and her space station, she would probably be offended if you didn’t include it as a main character. So when it came time for a sequel, I realized I needed a few more characters in order for the story to really grow. The first book focuses so much on redeeming Jax, the Station Mechanical Engineer, of her terrible reasons for isolating herself on a remote deep-space bus station. She needed to relearn what it meant to break down her walls and allow Saunders, the Station Security Officer, into her life. It was easy since everyone else was just passing through, and amounted to little more than a blur of faces with no consequence to Jax’s thoughts or feelings. But what happens when those poor souls find themselves trapped on Station, right along side Jax and her mounting social anxiety?
Looks like I need to reintroduce Jax to humanity, right around the same time they all find themselves so far away from humanity, Earth would long cease to exist long before the light from nearby stars might reach it.
And so, my favorite bit of this book was how much fun I had finding ways to drag my main character, kicking and screaming, back into the social engagement of her fellow humans. Because hell is other people, until you find yourself stuck in actual hell with other people, and they you have to, like, get along and stuff.
I knew I couldn’t just throw a bunch of names into the mix and hope readers started to care about them. I wanted these characters to have actual meaning, and actual purpose. And more than anything I needed them to have a real impact on how my main character started to view her fellow survivors as people she cared about, rather than transients she could ignore. It became really fun to work through how Jax, this surly, grumpy, socially awkward engineer, might interact with, say, a feisty researcher who reminds her of her lost academia, while they traverse the alien universe they find themselves in. It turned out that forcing Jax to become amenable to the giant stack of a welder gave my main character the lez-bro she never wanted and always needed; offering the best banter one could hope for while battling leviathan horrors of the deep. And I particularly enjoyed showing Jax that there was a valuable need for finding her connection to humanity, even if it was with someone who had far too many eyeballs to be human.
I was worried I would hate the fact that I might need to create more people, with real thoughts and feelings, and that I would dislike them as much as my main character did in the first book. But it turned out, that as I went, I started begrudgingly liking these characters at the same time Jax realized she might actually enjoy having friends.
Jax and her poor station go through a door to another side. And everyone aboard goes with them. They find themselves at the mercy of the universe as it rolls the dice, and every outcome tessellates outwards from them like fractal mathematics. But at every step of the way as they navigate an endless expanse of uncharted deep space, or the terror-fill claustrophobia of being submerged on an alien planet, or the audacity of true xenobiological forms trying to devest them of their limbs, Jax starts to realize that she needs these people, and that they need her too. And I had so much fun helping her figure this out, whether she wanted to or not.
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BIO:
A.Z. builds spaceships in her day job. She teaches about spaceships on the side. And now she apparently writes about spaceships in her spare time. Where she finds the spare time is still a mystery. Having been raised on a steady diet of classic science fiction and horror—consumed mostly through the staircase railing after bedtime while her father was asleep on the couch—A.Z. has always maintained a love for space travel and the unknown. This has largely fueled her career in aerospace engineering but originally fueled a passion for writing science fiction stories when she was very young. After a long quantity of months cooped up inside, A.Z. finally returned to her storytelling origins. A.Z. lives in the Mid-Atlantic region of the US with her wife and son, their dogs, several thousand honeybees, and way too many Legos.
You can find her at https://azrotheeng.com/ and on bluesky @azrozkillis.
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