Christian Bieck is joining us today to talk about his novel, A Basquet of Cats. Here’s the publisher’s description:
Gentza is a young black cat living a happy life in the Basque lands of medieval France. He shares an intimate mind-to-mind connection with his human friend and companion, the Archmage Zumar Etxartea.
When his human companion is captured, along with the mage lady bonded to Gentza’s friend Kitty, it is up to the cats to save the day.
They must use their feline magic and build a coalition of animals to face dark enchantments, mean people who exploit animals, and a band of truly bad cats.
Can they find a way to set the world aright?
For young adults and animal lovers of all ages.
What’s Christian’s favorite bit?
I’m prone to world-builders disease, contracted back in the 1980s when DMing a long-running AD&D 1st edition-based campaign, not set in the Forgotten Realms but rather in my own world of Lebora.World-building never felt useless; while the group could simply sidestep carefully crafted encounters, traps, and puzzles, the world was there to stay, and each detail added depth to the overall story. And magic systems! Endless possibilites to geek out, especially if you had like-minded players who were happy to go along for the ride.
Enter my debut novel, A Basquet of Cats. Its world of an alternate 13th century southwest France has two magic systems, one human magic, the other that of cats. I’m no Brandon Sanderson, but this felt like a goldmine for my inner geek itching to scratch the world-building itch, and tell everyone about it.
Human magic in the Whiskerverse is item-based. Humans don’t cast Fireball, or conjure up storms; they “magick” items, using rituals spoken in Basque, to store power for single use (in tokens, spellstones, or similar), for repeated use (constructs), or continuous effect (charms, amulets, wards). The magic of cats, on the other hand, is purely mind-based, just like in the real world. Who of us living with a cat hasn’t felt the relentless push of their mind-bending magic powers to get us to do what they want? It’s like that in Basquet, with the addition of glamours, illusions, aversion fields and other like mind tricks.
The two, cat and human, come together in the Ritual of Bonding, the piece of magic that connects the two mind-to-mind, creating what many call mage and familiar, but which in its strongest form is a true companionship between human and animal.
So far, so good. The problem? The story is told through the eyes and mouths of cats. (Actually, the body language of cats, no talking involved; but that would be the topic of a different Favorite Bit post.) And because Basquet’s felines are very smart cats, but real cats nevertheless, they couldn’t care less about most of the detail aspects of magic. So how do I convey all those super-interesting details of how magic works to the readers?
To my great chagrin, the answer after several revision rounds of cutting more and more exposition was: I don’t. As much as I myself enjoy explanations, almost none of it was essential to the story, so out it went. There are a few scenes where one cat shows their friends how one thing or another works, and a slightly expositiony human teaching moment, but that’s it.
Because I love world-building, I still have all those pages of details about the magic written down and ready to be used at any time in any other story set in the Whiskerverse—of which I do plan to write a few. The (vaguely plausible) genetics of human magic? It’s called the MAG locus, an ancient cluster of retroviral-derived enhancers and regulatory RNAs that landed in the human genome about 120,000 years ago. Why Basque is the language of magic? Because Basque is a language isolate with enormous linguistic longevity, and Vennemann’s Vasconic substrate hypothesis happens to be true. The history of magic and mages in Europe? Magic was discovered by Vasconic shamans in the Pyrenees foothills; after the conquest of Hispania it spread via Roman legions across known Europe. And In 955 CE, the Council of Five was established as the ruling body of magekind.
Only that last bit, the Council of Five, is mentioned in the book, and that only in passing. Because, as I wrote above, cats could care less who rules the human mages.
But since Mary Robinette graciously allowed me to post on her journal, at least I still get to geek out a little bit.
Thank you for that.
LINKS:
BIO:
Christian Bieck fell in love with the fantastic after following Lucy through a magical wardrobe as a boy. He also loves animals, which is why he lives in a secret compound in southwest France with his wife, two cats, two dogs, two alpacas, and a big flock of chickens. One day almost 20 years ago, he decided to combine those two loves into stories. A Basquet of Cats is his first novel; before that, he published several short stories in English and German (his French isn’t good enough yet) in various anthologies.
Christian recently retired from his day job as a futurist—what he called “writing speculative non-fiction for business executives”—to focus on the good life in France, which besides the obvious includes making music, teaching tennis, and of course writing more stories starring cats and other magical beings!
*Mary Robinette an affiliate of Bookshop.org and will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. This does not increase your cost; it simply helps support her work