J.T. Greathouse is the BFA nominated author of the PACT & PATTERN trilogy: THE HAND OF THE SUN KING, THE GARDEN OF EMPIRE, and THE PATTERN OF THE WORLD (forthcoming August, 2023). In addition to writing, he has been a student in Beijing, an ESL instructor in Taipei, a bookseller, and a high school English teacher. His short fiction has appeared, often as Jeremy A. TeGrotenhuis, in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, PodCastle, IGMS, and elsewhere.

The Tower of the Tyrant is due for publication on 6th November.
You can read Nils’ review here or pre-order your copy copy on Bookshop.org

Welcome back to the Hive, Jeremy! We’re excited to be chatting to you about your new standalone fantasy, The Tower of the Tyrant. Could you tell our readers a little bit about it? 

Glad to be back, Nils! I always find this book hard to talk about in brief, but I’ll do my best.

The Tower of the Tyrant is a sword and sorcery adventure about the sacrifices people are willing to make in order to feel safe and secure in a dangerous and incomprehensible world. It follows Fola, a sorceress from a utopian city where everyone’s needs are taken care of by magic that no one fully understands. As part of the effort to understand the magic of the city – and therefore guard against it ever failing – Fola travels the wider world seeking artifacts and magical phenomena left behind by the First Folk who built it. In particular, she is interested in necromancy, as she believes the best way to learn about the First Folk’s magic would be to conjure their ghosts. She is drawn towards hauntings and wraiths and other spooky things as part of a project to figure out how to do so.

The main setting of the novel is Parwys, a vaguely Arthuriana-ish kingdom currently embroiled in a mess of problems, where Fola arrives as part of her investigation into the undead. The book opens with the king of Parwys ranting madly at a thunderstorm, and then either being killed by the ghosts he claims haunt him or leaping from the tower to end his own madness. 

Meanwhile, the Mortal Church – an expansionist religion that wants to scrape the world clean of all the First Folk’s leavings – has designs on enfolding Parwys into its influence and might be willing to manufacture a civil war in the kingdom in order to do so. And off in the hinterlands of Parwys, deep in the forest, a tree-man called Llewyn who was given into the service of a fae queen as part of a bargain hunts an ancient fiend. A hunt that reveals dark secrets and sacrifices, and ends with him breaking from his service and adopting a young girl bearing a terrible curse.

To investigate the haunting, Fola will have to deal with its fraught politics, the threat of the Mortal Church, and the complications of the tree-man, the girl, and the lingering power of the ancient fiend. Plus, she sort of has a thing for a four-armed mercenary she hired, but dating an employee is sort of icky (especially when you’re from a utopian city where the concept of having an “employee” is sort of icky to begin with) so that’s also complicating things.

There’s a lot going on, but it all comes together! I promise! (And you well know, having read it!)

One of my favourite aspects of your novel was your creation of the City of the Wise, a utopian place where starvation, hardship, violence and even death was no longer present due to the First Folk’s magic. I thought this was a fantastic way to contrast all the conflicts present in the wider world. Was this contrast something you had always set out to explore? 

The contrast you’re speaking of was at the heart of the worldbuilding from the get-go. From inception, the main idea was “what if there was a utopian city in the middle of a grimdark fantasy world?”

Have you read the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks? If not, and you liked the City of the Wise as a concept, you should. I more or less borrowed the idea of an anarcho-communist fully automated egalitarian utopia surrounded by chaos and danger from Banks. I just transplanted it into a fantasy world and gave it a few of my own twists (for example, the Culture is built and managed by incomprehensibly complicated AI minds with godlike powers, whereas the City of the Wise was built by the First Folk, who were immortal elf-like beings who disappeared without a trace, and is now managed by ancient spells that no one understands. Also people in the City of the Wise have utility birds instead of AI drones to do everything for them). 

What appeals to me about the Culture, and what I tried to capture with the City of the Wise, is the tension at the heart of a lot of utopian fiction, and in fact the root word of the term “utopia.” Utopia literally means “no-place,” and was coined by Thomas More because the perfect society he was writing about was too perfect to believably exist. There’s a tendency in utopian fiction to explore some kind of rot or flaw at the heart of a seemingly perfect society, but that’s not what interests me about it. What interests me is this “unbelievability.” This idea that human nature, or the laws of physics, or what have you somehow prevent the realization of true equality and egalitarianism. I think that’s pretty pessimistic. 

But it makes sense! We can see the difficulty of achieving utopia in our own world. As technology becomes more and more sophisticated, less and less actual work is needed to take care of everyone, and yet we’re all working more and more while a small handful of people vacuum up all the extra benefit of those technologies and our labor. The perception of utopias as truly impossible is both created by that structure and feeds into that structure. When we ask, in the US, “why can’t we have universal health care? It seems like we could afford it” we’re told “those universal health care systems are all flawed and bad. You wouldn’t want one anyway.” There’s always the threat of some hidden complication or flaw, a thorn in the berry bush waiting to prick you, to keep people from trying to reach for the berries.

That got rambly! To bring it back around to your question, I’m interested in that perception of utopias as unbelievable. In the world of Thaumedony, the City of the Wise is 100% real, but its residents are terrified that there might be some hidden flaw that could unmake it one day. More, the people who live outside of it have all heard rumors of its existence – and could go live there just by walking for a few days or weeks – but they don’t believe it could be real, because their own lives are hard and it’s too difficult to accept that there could be a better way of life. Plus, the lords of these kingdoms outside the City work very hard to demonize it or convince their people that it’s only a legend as a way of preserving their own power. It’s all an elaborate metaphor for the ways in which people are kept from believing that this world, our world, could really be a better place.

You also explore some rather fascinating magic systems throughout, that of Thaumaturgy and of The Mortal Church. Can you give us a little more insight into both and how they differ? 

The magic systems are all tied back into a central question of the novel, which is “how can we make ourselves safe?” In the City of the Wise, the way to make ourselves safe is to accurately understand how all this ancient First Folk magic that takes care of us actually works. So Thaumaturgy, the magic of the City, is all about rigor and formula and accuracy for the sake of reproducibility – much like modern science. The goal is, one day, for everyone to understand how everything works well enough that the whole world could be made into a paradise like the City, but that day is a long way off.

In the realms where the Mortal Church holds sway, the world is far more dangerous. The things the First Folk left there are monsters, or magical things that cause sickness, or powerful weapons that people misuse. Generally, bad stuff. The attitude towards the First Folk, and magic in general, is that these things are threats at best and corrupting influences at worst. So the way to make ourselves safe, in those parts of the world, is to cultivate self-discipline. That way, we don’t need the things the First Folk left behind and aren’t tempted by them.

Parwys, too, has its own attitudes about how to keep itself safe, largely revolving around tradition and a certain story about how the kingdom was founded. Honestly, of the three, I think Parwys’s magic system is the most troubling. It leaves no room for progress of any kind and forces people to occupy very rigid roles within society in order to keep the magic going. But that’s all in the novel, I think, so I’ll leave it there.

Pulling things back one more step, the approach to magic system design in this book, and any subsequent Thaumedony books, draws from my interest in ethics and moral philosophy. Each of the different ways of doing magic are based in the underlying logic of a specific branch of moral philosophy. Big nerds (or fans of THE GOOD PLACE) might have fun making a game of trying to identify which magic correlates to Kant, or Thomas Aquinas, or Peter Singer, etc.

Fola’s character is such a great driving force of the novel, I loved seeing her develop throughout and she became a firm favourite. Did her character go through many changes during subsequent drafts? 

 Thank you! She was a blast to write. The core of her character was always there, but it took a few drafts to draw it out into the forefront and make the connections between her motivations and the conflict in Parwys more explicit. I tend to build books out of themes. When I’m doing worldbuilding or thinking about a character or a plot point, I’m thinking about it in terms of how it connects to a specific theme I have in mind for the book. Fola’s character was always directly based in one of those thematic through lines. 

But I’m also a discovery writer, so the exact way those things are present and all connected together isn’t planned, and everything tends to evolve and become more coherent in the drafting and redrafting process.

Other than Fola you also include many other POV’s and two of my favourites were Llewyn and Siwan. Who were your favourites to write and why? 

Honestly, Torin was the most fun, because he’s just such a bastard. There’s something maybe a little naughty about inhabiting the mind of that sort of character, someone who you probably wouldn’t be friends with in real life who lets you explore the darkest corners of your own psyche. Maybe there’s something therapeutic about it.

But I love them all. Fola is aspirational – not without her problems, but a genuinely good person with a strong moral compass and a lot of courage. I sympathize with Llewyn the most because his struggle is the most grounded, despite being a fae tree-man with a wooden sword that holds part of his soul. He’s just trying to protect his adoptive daughter and deal with the trauma of his own very troubled upbringing. And poor little Owyn just wants to do the right thing, but he’s in way over his head and he’s not getting the best advice, so it’s very easy to empathize even when he makes terrible mistakes.

The Citizens from the City of Wise each have a bird familiar—Fola’s is a nightjar. My question to you is which species of bird would be your familiar/companion and why?

I should make some kind of internet personality quiz, like back in the Myspace era, to pick people’s birds for them. Like “what’s your Hogwarts house?” but instead it picks a weird, totally unique bird familiar for you and doesn’t bother explaining how it got that result. [Ed: YES PLEASE Jeremy!!]

Mine would be. . . Hmmm. . . This is genuinely hard. Birdwatching was a hobby I shared with my late grandfather, so I really love birds, and it’s hard to pick just one. Plus, there’s the added complexity of the bird somehow representing your personality in some way. If I pick an owl or a hawk that feels sort of conceited, you know? Ravens are my favorite birds, but I’m not sure my bird familiar would BE a raven, if that makes sense.

Let’s go with an American Kestrel, with subtle moss-green stripes on its tail feathers. They’re pretty common for falcons, but they’re very pretty and they’re falcons, which are cool. Also they’re only about the size of a dove, so it doesn’t feel too arrogant to associate myself with one.

I noticed that the novel contained some Welsh influences, particularly with the inclusion of the mythological gwyddien and places such as Glascoed. I was wondering what drew you to this? 

Great question! I’ve been interested in Arthuriana since I read the Prince Caspian comics as a kid, and that eventually led me to reading other British myth and legend, including the [Welsh] Mabinogion [Mabinogi]. My previous trilogy was inspired by the Ming dynasty era in China, but for this I wanted to do something a little more “traditional fantasy” but with its own unique flair. But of course you can’t invent everything out of whole cloth (not even Tolkien did that, really) so I turned to some mythological influences from Europe, particularly Celtic myth and legend, in designing Parwys. The very first thing I wrote for this novel was Llewyn and Siwan’s introductory chapters (which were published as a short story in Beneath Ceaseless Skies when the rest of the book was still in its very early stages) and the influences there are, I think, somewhat obvious.

I love “classic” fantasy worlds, but they tend to feel a bit samey when everyone is drawing from the same well of Tolkien and D&D and so on, so I tried to dig a little deeper into the old cultures that those more contemporary things are, themselves, drawing from. Hopefully I did my influences justice!

Without giving away too much, can you tell us a favourite scene that you wrote? 

There is a funeral sequence which I particularly love. I got to do some experimenting with point of view and flashback that I found very interesting from a craft perspective. Plus, I think the scene achieved a surprising emotional gut punch while delivering a key thematic idea for the whole book. It was just a blast to work on, and several people have told me it was their favorite chapter in the book.

You also explore some pretty heavy philosophical themes throughout, that of every being, fae, fiend or human, deserving to live and that of history being rewritten. The Mortal Church’s conflict with the City and the history of Parwys illustrates both well. How important was it for you to express different sides of the argument? 

I think there are basically two kinds of villains in fiction. The first are the forces of nature, the Jokers (from Batman) or the Judge Holdens (from Blood Meridian). These are characters who feel fundamentally monstrous in some way. Not like human beings, just instruments of evil without reason or justification for their actions – or any interest in justifying their actions. You can write great stories about those kinds of villains, but I don’t tend to be drawn to writing them.

The other kind of villain is someone who sees themself as the hero. Someone who, from their perspective, is doing the right thing. Whose evil stems from selfishness, or prejudice, or willful blindness to the suffering of others, but who nevertheless needs to tell themself a story about why what they’re doing is right and good. Your Lex Luthors or Tywin Lannisters.

I think there are a lot more villains of the later type in the real world, and I think a lot of the hardest, most intransigent conflicts in the real world arise because people who are doing evil are able to convince themselves that they’re doing the right thing, or at least a necessary thing for their own safety.

I also find those kinds of conflicts more interesting to write. The story has more depth and complexity when the protagonists are a bit flawed (or even very flawed) and when the villains at least have some kind of moral compass, no matter how skewed. On the one end you have Fola, who is basically a good person but with some personality flaws and boundary issues. On the other you have Torin, a villain who is willing to do genocide for the sake the greater good – but who genuinely believes it would be for the greater good and who does have some real morality to him. In the middle you have Llewyn and Owyn who are trying to do the right thing, but might not know how. I like exploring the full spectrum of those different moral experiences that people can have. Plus, in order for the nuances of someone like Llewyn’s moral struggle to come through, you need a contrast with someone like Torin, who is far more certain about what he’s doing even though he’s wrong about almost everything.

I have to say all your covers have such beautifully detailed artwork and Tower of the Tyrant is no exception! How involved were you? Were you able to convey to the artist the aesthetic you wanted portrayed or did you leave it to them? 

 I’ve been so lucky with my cover art, and not every author is, so I’m very grateful for that. This time the artist is Ken Taylor, who is an Australian illustrator who mostly worked on concert posters for death metal bands before this. I was offered two options for artists, and I liked them both, but Ken’s style felt more “epic” so we ended up going with him – and wow! We made the right choice, for sure.

I gave some suggestions for what the scene on the cover of the book should be, as well as a few clarifying details about how the tower and the tree growing from it should be designed, but that was all, really, other than some input into the final color scheme. The other color options were also great though, and I would have been happy with any of them, but the one we landed on was my favorite.

While I loved the covers for the Pact & Pattern books, I’ve always wanted one of those classic fantasy illustrated covers with a landscape and a heroic figure, and Ken captured that essence in a really cool and unique way. I couldn’t be happier!

Your first published work was the Pact and Pattern trilogy. What made you decide to switch to a fantasy standalone? And was this easier or more challenging to write? 

There are several reasons. First, by the time I finished Pact & Pattern I was pretty burnt out on the story. I’m a discovery writer, as mentioned earlier, so part of the fun is figuring out the story while I write it. By the time I got to the third book in the trilogy, I had already basically figured everything out. It made writing the third book kind of boring (though also easy) and I want to keep the writing process fun and interesting for myself.

Second, there are certain economic realities in publishing which make writing a series kind of a gamble. If you write a series, the second and third books can never sell more than the first book. When new books in a series come out, you hope that people who read the previous books will pick up the new one, but really what you need is for new readers to pick up the first one. Sometimes that happens, sometimes it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, it can be very hard to continue your career.

With a series of standalones, each book gets its own chance to succeed or fail, to find new readers or not. You can experiment with new characters, new stylistic flourishes, new plot structures, new subgenres, etc. Terry Pratchett did this super well with the Discworld series, and Iain M. Banks did too in the Culture books, where some are classic space opera adventures, others are spy novels, while others are genre-bending mysteries (Excission is a particular favorite of mine, and takes the form of a chatlog between a bunch of super-intelligent spaceships trying to figure out what’s going on with a weird space-time anomaly. On paper, it shouldn’t work, but it absolutely does). This approach simultaneously seems more fun as a writer, and gives readers many “on-ramps” into your work. Each time a new book comes out, that book has a chance to draw in new people who might not have been interested in the previous one – but then maybe they really like your stuff and go back and read the rest of it! That’s what happened to me with Terry Pratchett. I started with Mort because a friend lent it to me, and then Small Gods and Monstrous Regiment, and only then decided to start figuring out what order I should be reading the books in.

Third, I’ve always had more ideas than I have time to write. I still work a full time job as a teacher and a part time job/hobby as a bookseller, and I get my writing done in the morning before work, on the weekends, and over the summer break. If I’m going to have time to explore all those ideas for characters and settings and conflicts and themes and ways that magic could be, it’s going to be a lot easier if I’m writing standalones.

Right Jeremy, what’s next for you? What can we expect from your next standalone? 

I’m contracted for three “Thamedony” books with Gollancz, of which The Tower of the Tyrant is the first. I’ve already turned in the second, which doesn’t have an official title yet. It’s set entirely in the City of the Wise. The basic premise is “a murder mystery in a paradise, where no one should be able to die.” It’s shorter, with only one PoV character, and borrows from the fast pacing of mysteries and thrillers, though does spiral out into something a bit more epic in the second half. This one is set about 80 years after The Tower of the Tyrant, with a new primary cast, though one very minor character in Tyrant has a more significant role in this one, and there are a few cameos.

Now I’m about 15,000 words into the very first draft of the third book, which isn’t set in stone yet. The plan is for it to be set about 40 or 50 years before Tyrant, in the nearby nation of Goll, set during a religious schism and civil war. So far my main inspirations for it are the Byzantine Empire, Kentaro Miura’s Berserk, and the Bonehunters arc from The Malazan Book of the Fallen, though stylistically I’m trying to channel a bit of Guy Gavriel Kay.

After that. . . who knows? I’d love to keep doing Thaumedony books, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to continue without more contracts from Gollancz. So if you liked The Tower of the Tyrant and want more of this world, tell your friends! Or just buy extra copies and throw them at strangers on the street! (Do not actually do this. Hand them to strangers gently, please)

I also have some ideas for non-fantasy projects that I’ve had back-burnered for a while, like a horror thing inspired by a time I saw a cat get hit by a car on my walk to school, a thriller based in northern Idaho that tries to grapple with the intransigence and resurgence of white supremacy in America, and a more slip-streamy historical fiction / weird fiction book set during the interwar years in Berlin and Paris about the parallel rise of the surrealist movement and fascism. Who knows if I’ll ever write any of that, though! Not enough hours in the day and days in the year to do everything!

Finally, what is the one thing you hope readers take away from your writing?

 Well, I hope people have fun. Despite the massive blocks of text above about philosophy and so forth, I do think this is a very fun book. Especially the second half, where things really pop off. 

But I also hope people come away with a slightly more thoughtful perspective about history, how it is written, why certain narratives might be promoted and others suppressed. In our current historical moment, it seems very important to think critically about which stories we tell about ourselves and why people might want to suppress certain stories, and that’s definitely something this book is interested in.

Thank you so much for joining us today!

Absolutely! Always a pleasure, and so glad you enjoyed the book.

The Tower of the Tyrant is due for publication on 6th November.
You can read Nils’ review here or pre-order your copy copy on Bookshop.org