Cadwell Turnbull is joining us today to talk about his novel, A Ruin, Great and Free. Here’s the publisher’s description:
From bestselling and award-winning author Cadwell Turnbull comes A Ruin, Great and Free, the stunning conclusion to the popular Convergence Saga.
It has been nearly two years since the anti-monster riots. The inhabitants of Moon have been very fortunate in the intervening months. Inside their hidden monster settlement, they’ve found peace, even as the world outside slips into increasing unrest. Monsters are being hunted everywhere, forced back into the shadows they once tried to escape from. Other secret settlements have offered a place to hide, but how long can this half-measure against fear and hatred last?
Over the course of three days, the inhabitants of Moon are tested. The Black Hand continues to search for them and the Cult of the Zsouvox wants to make Moon the last stand in their war against the Order of Asha. This is more than enough to reckon with, but the gods have also placed their sights on Moon–and they bring with them a conflict that may either save or unravel the universe itself.
What’s Cadwell’s favorite bit?
The Convergence Saga is about a lot of things: monster civil rights, secret societies, quantum mechanics, responsible godhood, and solidarity economics, to name a few. There are many perspective characters (would you believe me if I told you I’ve never counted?), most of which are something more than human.
I have this theory I teach in writing workshops that first clicked for me in a writing workshop. Put simply: A story, any story, needs weights and counterweights. If you’re doing something wild, out there, you need something else to help anchor that stuff. Something concrete and down-to-earth. The bigger the swing, the more grounding you need. The weight is the cool thing you really want to do. The counterweight is the quiet thing, the specific thing, the very mundane thing that helps to balance out all that coolness.
In each book of the Convergence Saga, I tried to put in several counterweights. In No Gods, No Monsters, the first book in the series, one of my characters does woodcarving as a hobby and there’s a scene where he carves a bird of happiness. There’s a swim meet in No Gods. Someone bakes bread. I spent maybe too much time on the page having a character plan a surprise birthday party. The book has werewolves and tech mages and a god that is also a black cat. I wanted that cool stuff to feel real. Woodcarving and bread baking and competitive swimming help anchor all that weird stuff in a recognizable reality.
In A Ruin, Great and Free, the third and final book in the series, things get pretty big, pretty out there. For example, there’s a thirty-page battle between werewolves, vampires, witches, a few deities, and more than one giant. The fate of the world is literally at stake. How do you counterweight that?
Well. Here’s a scene where one of my perspective characters—a dragon-shifter named Dragon—makes jam:
The pot is nearly full with dark blackberry goo. The jam is beginning to set, and the scent is rich, spicy. It’s Georgie’s secret recipe that she refuses to share with anyone, even Connor. In the end, the jam will be peppery-sweet and tart with a faint nutty aftertaste.
After a minute of stirring, a white foam begins to settle on top of the jam. Dragon knows what to do. He takes the shallow spoon from the draining rack and skims the froth off the top, then quickly cleans the spoon and returns it to the rack. All without having to put the stirring spoon in his mouth.
“You’re a natural,” Connor says.
“It’s easy.”
“And yet, I botch a batch almost every week. Take the compliment, little man.”
Jumping ahead a touch:
Dragon goes over to Georgie’s workstation. She has three pots going. He grabs a spoon.
As he is stirring Georgie’s signature raspberry pepper jam, Dragon finds the courage to ask a question that has been on his mind for a while. “Why do it this way when you can have the ants make the signature jams?”
Okay, jumping forward one more time, but with some added context. This scene is set in a hidden intentional community for monsters and their human allies. In this community there are a few worker cooperatives, businesses owned and governed by their workers. One of them is a jammery. (Also the community has magic machine ants that can make or build almost anything, because … weights!)
Now: Georgie’s answer to Dragon’s question:
“You might think . . . well, I don’t know if you do, but I’ve heard others say, ‘We’re trapped here.’ And, yes, that’s sort of true. We can’t leave for any long period of time without risking our lives in some way. But I think part of the reason we feel trapped is a matter of perspective. For most of human history, people stayed in their little village or town, never venturing far from the river or lake or valley or island or mountain settlement of their birth. And yet, they had full lives, full of any sort of drama you can imagine. Depth of experience isn’t only about how far you can roam; it is about how deeply you can live. And for me, making jam the long way is a form of living. It isn’t just a thing to do. When I make jam, I feel connected to the world beneath my feet and to the people who are eating my jam out in the world. I feel connected because I am contributing to a network of life and living and experience, and while doing that I am having an experience. This is as valuable as any big thing you can do out there. Value is in the heart and the hands. I know what I am doing and why I am doing it, and it has meaning to me.
“So,” she says, touching Dragon gently on the arm, “I’ve untrapped myself. I am as wide as the universe.”
That last bit is thematically important to the series. That bit is a love letter to all the little things we do that may not be saving the world, but are adding something beautiful to the world. And that’s what “weights and counterweights” is really about: giving value to the little things. Making all the stuff matter, not just the big stuff. Because it does matter. Every little thing.
And all those small moments add up. They become mighty.
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BIO:
Cadwell Turnbull is the award-winning author of The Lesson; No Gods, No Monsters; We Are the Crisis and A Ruin, Great and Free. His short fiction has appeared in The Verge, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and several anthologies, including The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019. His novel The Lesson won the 2020 Neukom Institute Literary Award in the debut category. The novel was also shortlisted for the VCU Cabell Award and longlisted for the Massachusetts Book Awards. His novel No Gods, No Monsters is the winner of a Lambda Award and was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award. Turnbull grew up on St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands.