Heroines Eva and Reina work together to foil the plans of a powerful sorceress in Romero Lacruz’s Latin American folklore–infused debut, The Sun and the Void (Orbit, July).
What was your approach to incorporating history into your worldbuilding?
When I was writing the book, I mostly just wanted to make sure that the world felt lived in. I wanted it to feel like a real place, you know? I didn’t set out saying, okay, this is going to be a fantasy that’s historically accurate. But I was also really inspired by other high fantasy stories that use a real-world backdrop to inform the universe where they’re set. So my inspiration was post-colonial Colombia during the war of independence in the early 19th century. I even sprinkled in a couple of characters, like for example Samón is directly inspired by Simón Bolívar, but it’s not an attempt to be historically accurate.
How did you develop your unique, rock-based magic system?
I’m a chemical engineer, and people always say to write what you know. I was trying to figure out how I could fit my training into my fiction, so I decided to use a magic system that had a chemistry feel. It’s not a direct alchemy system but it kind of feels that way. Litio, galio, and bismuto are lithium, gallium, and bismuth. I was just looking up cool earth metals!
What inspired the novel’s fantasy races, the valcos and the nozariels?
I wanted to have fantasy races, just like elves and orcs, but not elves and orcs. I wanted to make my own. So I decided to use antlers, as they’re a popular motif in musica llanera, or music from the llanos [grassland plains of Colombia and Venezuela]. Then it kind of evolved naturally from that: two races with animal qualities. I wanted the valcos to be strong and to have antlers. For the nozariels, I thought, “Oh, what if they have a tail?” But because this is a society that gets colonized by humans, the proper way to appear physically is to have a human appearance. So cutting off the tail is a way to subjugate and enslave nozariels. And even after slavery is abolished and they’re “free” to do whatever they want, the nozariels continue to cut off their tails as a way to pass in this society. I thought that readers could potentially draw interesting parallels with the passing we all have to do.
Half-valco Eva and half-nozariel Reina come from very different backgrounds but have similar experiences. Tell me more about their relationship.
I wanted to tell the story from the points of views of two different creatures but also have them both struggle with the fact that they’re half-blood and feel that they have one foot in each world but are not welcome in either. That’s the experience I grew up with, and so I gave that experience to Eva and Reina.
