Rena Rockford is joining us today to talk about her novel, Mothball Magic. Here’s the publisher’s description:
She’s going to save the world even if she breaks a hip doing it.
Ruth has been there and done that. She’s already saved the world in WWII, when magic was locked away forever. So, when it inconveniently comes back in the middle of cooking dinner, seventy years later, Ruth must assemble a team of the mightiest geriatric magic-users left in the world to find out what caused it.
But this isn’t like sneaking behind enemy lines when they were younger. Just missing her heart medication might be a bigger danger than facing down the fae. Old witches and wizards without their powers are just old ladies and men. They might live longer, but they’re still only human, with grudges that go back decades.
It’s the Golden Girls meets the Dresden Files! Four geriatric people must stop the Queen of Winter from taking over the world, in Mothball Magic by Rena Rocford!
What’s Rena’s favorite bit?
Mothball Magic features elderly witches and wizards trying to navigate through our world with an unreliable source of magic, while dodging two fae queens bent on catching our heroes in a bad contract. But one of the things I never put forward in the lore of the novel is where these queens came from.
I spent a hot minute getting a master’s degree in Earth and Planetary Sciences. I studied the early solar nebula and spent rather a lot of time learning about the bits and pieces that make our entire solar system possible. One of the most fascinating bits about how we come to exist in the form we have is that there would have been other stars nearby ours, and in fact, we can see evidence of their existence.
More specifically, we can see the death of one of these stars.
As most people know, the larger a star, the shorter the lifespan—which is definitely an oversimplification—but most stars the size of our sun tend to measure their lives in terms of billions of years, and much larger stars often have lifespans significantly shorter. Some larger stars might collapse and experience a supernova within a short period of time—say a million years. For the early solar nebula, this would have been a drop in the bucket. In fact, in the stellar nursery around Sol, there may have been many stars that came and went before our sun could even call itself a star.
Woven throughout the evidence of the early solar nebula is the radioactive remnant of a short-lived radioisotope Aluminum 26. It only comes from nova like explosions, when a short-lived star cannibalizes its core and expels more energy in hours than in the whole rest of its life. In the study of the Early Solar Nebula, this event is often tapped as the catalyst that started the collapse of the nebular disc that allowed for the creation of our planets and possibly even jumpstarted Sol. One could say that a star had to die to give our planet and our sun life.
It’s possibly a bit poetic, and certainly an oversimplification of a very complicated process—no one tag in Niel Degrass Tyson—but like a powerful fae ready to strike a deal, I can safely say it is true, at least from a certain point of view.
I’ve always struggled with the idea of a Summer Queen and Winter Queen balanced in their power because the reason we have seasons is a tilt in our access. The power of the Summer Queen seems obvious: it’s the sun. The heart of that queen is merrily burning about 93 million miles from here.
But what about the Queen of Winter? Was that fae queen just all of space? All of the cold of space? That seemed like it would somehow be bigger than one middle sized star burning calmly enough not to boil all the oceans in a fit of pique. But what if Winter was the other star, the star that died to give us life, the star that spilled her dying heart into a nearby nebula, causing it to start down the road to life. Fiercely loyal to our little star system, as responsible for life as the sun, and so thoroughly mixed in that even scientists can see the evidence of her power, her malice, and the sheer terror that is the unbridled power of the natural world. And that is the origin of the two fae queens, not exactly equals, but both powerful and fiercely invested in our little rock flying through space.
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BIO:
Rena Rocford has carefully cultivated a mild-mannered alter ego to help blend in at her proverbial day job. Today the bills, tomorrow the world. With a long history of shady labs and government projects, Rena now creates nerdy art and enjoys rolling polyhedrons at imaginary monsters with her family and friends. Rena managed to procure the legitimacy of a Master’s in Planetary Sciences before slipping away from academia to pursue other opportunities. Her most recent book, Mothball Magic, unleashes into the wilds in May 2026.
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