Lauren C. Teffeau is joining us today to talk about her novel, A Hunger with No Name. Here’s the publisher’s description:
Thurava of Astrava is intended to become a herder, a most honored position for her dwindling community that clings to life on the banks of the Najimov, the river that’s the lifeblood of the high desert. But the Glass City on the horizon threatens the delicate balance the Astravans have managed to hold on to for centuries, polluting the air and water as the city grows bigger and bigger. The Glass City’s clockwork liaisons offer to bring the Astravans into the Glass City’s walls, but they will have to give up their ways and their precious herds to do so. Thurava must decide who she is without her animals, using the stars as her guide, putting herself on a collision course with the secrets the Glass City holds dear.
What’s Lauren’s favorite bit?
Whenever I write a story, I give myself what I’ve taken to calling a technical challenge to tackle over the course of the narrative. Not only am I trying to write a complete story with compelling characters and a unique plot, but I’m also trying to include a secret third thing to push me to develop my craft even if the story remains unpublished and relegated to the annals of my hard drive.
Sometimes that means writing to a tight deadline to prove I’ll be able to do so again when I’m under contract. Sometimes that means writing a story about trauma or grief or mass comm theories or whatever my current obsession is without ever explicitly saying so in the text. And sometimes, as is the case in my latest book A Hunger with No Name, which was published by University of Tampa Press last week, it means creating an entire worldview from scratch. One that not only worked for the story I was trying to tell, but was also not rooted in any sort of higher power, god/dess, or deity. In other words, I wanted to explore what a cultural mythos looked like without a theistic default. And the result has become my favorite bit of writing the novella.
A Hunger with No Name explores how the fate of a young herder named Thurava from a low-tech culture intersects with a much higher-tech one found in the Glass City lurking on the horizon, blowing up her worldview in the process and putting her values to the test as she comes face-to-face with technologies from the age before that should have been lost to time. Technologies that threaten the very existence of her culture because too many of her people view them as magic—too strong, too compelling, to fight off any longer.
But it felt too easy—too reductive—to have Thurava’s people believe in some kind of god to signal their relative lack of sophistication compared to the people living within the city walls. So instead I created a series of stories set in the stars, distilling their history down into lessons associated with constellations in the sky, a winnowing process that mirrored the winnowing of their society over the years. Each story features archetypes that encapsulate their culture’s values. Think Aesop’s Fables mashed up with variations on the monomyth. Not only do these constellation stories guide Thurava’s journey, they also help structure the novella, where each chapter is named after some aspect of those stories.
The resulting mythic texture (and thematic resonance, of which I’m particularly proud) gives A Hunger with No Name the feel of second-world fantasy even though there is no magic and much of the technology she encounters is rooted in what is possible today. I hope you will join me in charting your own journey through the stars that feature so prominently in the book.
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BIO:
Lauren C. Teffeau is a speculative fiction writer based in New Mexico. Her novel Implanted (2018, Angry Robot) was shortlisted for the 2019 Compton Crook award for best first SF/F/H novel and named a definitive work of climate fiction by Grist. Her latest novella, the environmental fantasy A Hunger with No Name, was released on September 20, 2024 by the University of Tampa Press and is available wherever books are sold. She’s had over twenty short stories published in speculative fiction magazines and anthologies including the Sunday Morning Transport, DreamForge Magazine, and the Bram Stoker Award-nominated Chromophobia: A Strangehouse Anthology by Women in Horror. To learn more, please visit her website: http://www.laurencteffeau.com
Thank you so much for hosting me today!