- What was your first published work? Tell me a little about it.
Oh, wow, it was a short poem titled “Modern Love” about how scary sex could be as a young gay man during the HIV/AIDS crisis. There’s a line I wrote that is so “baby gay poet” it makes me smile. Something like “love is hiding in a condom.” It was the early days of the world wide web, and NYU was publishing poetry and essays about the health crisis online. It’s a marvel that they’re all still there. http://cvisions.cat.nyu.edu/dwa/gallery.html
What was the inspiration for Broken Mirror?
A few ingredients combined to create the framework for this saga. I remember being on a train, travelling to and from Paris to a small town in Switzerland for a work meeting. The trip was around five hours each way. As I looked out the window, I was reflecting on how different my life was from most people’s. Half a world away from home, I was fretting over corporate purchasing policies and sustainability metrics, while the Alps rushed past, and then I was looking at really wild and colorful graffiti as the train approached Basel.
How had this become my life?
I got to thinking about a character that evolves beyond their upbringing and innate biology and wondering how far I could push the idea. Could a character accumulate so many bizarre and transformative experiences and modify their biology and mind to become something more than human? How would they relate to their friends and family and where they had come from?
That was the core of Victor Eastmore—isolated but trying to connect. The mental illness and family dynamics accumulated from there.
He actually started out as a pretty middle-class kind of guy. Then I shared a very rough draft with a dear friend who was living in London and working on a book about anti-terrorism tactics in Saudi Arabia. He’s always been a deeply spiritual thinker. We had long conversations about the manuscript and my intentions that steered Victor toward being from an elite family that symbolized the successes and failings of the political and economic systems. And those systems are threatened by his quest for the truth.
So, on the one hand, you have Victor coming from an elite family with all the resources and privileges that go along with that, but he’s also stigmatized, harassed, and victimized for having a mental illness that government policy and social norms say makes him the lowest of the low in the social hierarchy. For that part, I drew on some unfortunate and painful family history with mental illness and institutionalization. We really fail the most vulnerable among us and criminalize people who need medical and psychiatric help. I’m writing against that model while investigating the complicated and contentious issues around mental healthcare.
- What were your goals and intentions in this book, and how well do you feel you achieved them?
I knew I had three big challenges ahead of me as I was writing this book. First, it takes place in an alternate history world so I needed to bring the history into the story in smooth and natural way. Second, the story is a murder mystery so I had to lace in clues and twists. Third, and perhaps most challenging, I had to write from the perspective of a character with a mental illness that should feel familiar and realistic, but also vivid and uncanny, and create a strong bond and empathy between the character and readers.
There were also additional aspects that got polished in the revised second edition. I wanted to bring out the queer elements and make them shine a bit more so. The new version has more trans and nonbinary characters, polyamory, same-sex attraction, and makes things that were subtext more explicit. I worked on pacing a lot in the revision and made the leap toward non-linear storytelling.
Maybe the next book I write should be less ambitious. [laughing] No, I like a big challenge.
- Tell us something we don’t know about your heroes. What makes them tick?
Victor knows in his core that he’s being treated unfairly by the medical establishment and the government of Semiautonomous California. But while his grandfather is alive and seeking a cure for mirror resonance syndrome, Victor has both hope and complacency. When his grandfather dies, it’s a shock to system. Who is going to help him now? Victor is lacking agency at the beginning of the story, and he’s got to learn how to advocate for himself, how to take risks, and stand on his own two feet while managing the symptoms of his condition. He keeps going, which is a source of pride and self-actualization. There is an alt. history version of this book where Victor doesn’t look into his grandfather’s death, accepts his diagnosis, and he’s much more at the mercy of all the shenanigans around him. If you think Broken Mirror is bleak, that alternative version is much, much darker.
- Are there underrepresented groups or ideas featured if your book? If so, discuss them.
Yes, the story takes place in an alternate history world where, after the United States Civil War, Reconstruction is successful, meaning that formerly enslaved people and women gain full citizenship and civil rights. A movement called the Permanent Enlightenment wipes away the vestiges of racism, mixed-race couples become the norm, and Jim Crow laws never happen.
I was careful about not presenting this alt history as ethnic erasure or whitewashing. Diverse cultures are maintained, but American Imperialism begins to wane and reverse its wrongs. It’s a portrait of a possible utopian future for the Americas where reparations lead to lasting change and the fulfillment of justice.
What are you working on now, and when can we expect it?
Tortured Echoes is the sequel to Broken Mirror, and it’s currently available. The third book in the series, Altered Bodies, is in the editing process now and is scheduled for release in summer 2025.
A fractured mind or a global conspiracy? Uncovering the truth can be hell when nobody believes you… and you can’t even trust yourself.
Broken Mirror is the first volume in a queer psychological science fiction saga that looks at the stigma of mental illness and the hellish distrust and alienation that goes with it.
Victor Eastmore knows someone killed his grandfather, the pioneering scientist Jefferson Eastmore. But Victor, diagnosed with mirror resonance syndrome, has been shunned by Semiautonomous California society. Nobody will believe a Broken Mirror. Now Victor must tread the line between sanity and reclassification—a fate that all but guarantees he’ll lose his freedom.
With its self-driving cars, global firearms ban, and a cure for cancer, the science fiction world of Broken Mirror may sound like a near future utopia, but on Resonant Earth, history has taken a few wrong turns. The American Union is a weak and fractious alliance of nations in decline. Europe manipulates its citizens through propaganda. And Asia is reeling from decades of war.
Determined to uncover the truth about Jefferson’s murder, pansexual Victor and his trans friend Elena set out on a road trip that takes them across the American Union from Semiautonomous California through the Organized Western States to the Republic of Texas. But Elena is holding something back, and Victor’s condition worsens.
Amid shifting geopolitical sands, Broken Mirrors like Victor find themselves at a cyberpunk crossroads: evolve or go extinct.
Warnings: violence, discrimination against characters with mental health challenges
Amazon
Cody is giving away an ebook copy of Tortured Echoes, the sequel to Broken Mirror:
—Victor Eastmore, Apology to Resonant Earth, (transmission date unknown)
29 February 1991
It’s one thing to die quietly with things left unsaid among family members. It’s another thing to do what the great Jefferson Eastmore did with his secrecy and architecture of conspiracy: keep essential truths from Victor and put him on a collision course with an uncanny future.
Victor gazed across City Lake toward the tessellated foothills, where the elite families of Oakland and Bayshore kept their hedges trimmed and thorny. His grandfather’s sarcophagus was up there, surrounded by marble pillars and gold-gilt fencing shaped like twisted strands of DNA. A tidy and neat brick gravemound would never have sufficed, since at the end of his life, Jefferson was as grandiose as his cancer-curing career. The stones were plucked from the canals of New Venice, and a plaque listed the man’s many accomplishments. Not listed was his failed effort to cure Victor of mirror resonance syndrome.
Victor spun around to face the city skyline. The morning was bright and windy. The timefeed on his MeshBit indicated thirty minutes until his reclassification appointment. He could go and wait in the anteroom, but his anxious vibrations might shake the building to its foundations.
He took a breath. No going back. Before the sun reached its zenith that day, his path would materialize. If he were lucky, he could stay a Class Three: free but under close supervision. Or he could become a Class Two: under guard, imprisoned, at a rancho in the hinterlands. He whispered a cherished but inconsistently effective mantra to fight off brain blankness: The wise owl listens before asking who. Each episode of blanking out was one more step toward mirror resonance syndrome’s inevitable tragic end: becoming a comatose Class One, insensate, a forgotten ward of the government. The only unknown factor was how quickly the future would crash against him.
He trudged along the shoreline, tensing and relaxing his jaw, trying to distract himself. Glittering towers rose exultantly cityside. Squally breezes swooped out of a cloudless, azure sky and assaulted bulrushes, sedges, and cattails in the shallows where a grid of waterplots penned them in.
Granfa Jefferson had been poisoned. Victor knew it. He had proof. But his family didn’t believe him, and if he said any more about it, he would be locked away. Fair? No. Surprising? Not really. After all, his life was a farcical succession of tragedies. It wasn’t time to give up, though. Not while he had unanswered questions.
The palm trees encircling the lake rustled like cheerleaders shaking their pom-poms. The water rippled, creating countless sun flashes on the lake’s surface, and afterimages glowed and pulsed when he closed his eyes. The stench of goose shit turned his stomach.
He wedged the MeshBit’s detachable sonobulb in his ear, then called Elena. She answered right away. This was not the first time her promptness was suspicious.
“See?” she said. “When a friend calls, you should answer. Right away. Not never.”
“I know. I need your help,” he said. “My appointment is here. I’m having trouble.”
“Where are you?” she asked.
“City Lake. West shore.”
“I can’t get there in time.”
You were there for Granfa Jeff’s funeral. You showed up at my apartment whenever you wanted. Why can’t you be here now?
“Then talk to me,” Victor said. “Anything to keep my mind off my theories about Granfa Jeff.”
At the time, Victor had nothing close to the truth about Jefferson’s secret messages and plans for conspiracy and counter-conspiracy. He couldn’t have guessed his role in the proliferating conflagration that would transform every person on Resonant Earth and beyond. No one could have predicted the neuro-contagion that eventually radiated beyond the American Union of Nations, or the mind-machine hybridization that became humanity’s destiny, or the fact that crossing over to another world would become a possibility rather than paranoia. If Victor had guessed any of it, he might have failed his reclassification deliberately and shown up at the gates of a rancho to check himself in. All this was a lot to have piled onto a mentally unstable young adult.
“But you found radiation on the data egg,” Elena said. “I believe you. We’re going to figure this out.”
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