Having previously written four novels about characters from Marvel Comics, author Tristan Palmgren is now turning their attention to one from a different fictional universe: the science fiction space opera board game Twilight Imperium.
In the following email interview, Palmgren talks about what inspired and influenced the sci-fi space opera spy novel Twilight Imperium: Voice Of One (paperback, Kindle).
To start, what is Twilight Imperium: Voice Of One about, and when and where does it take place both in relation to our reality and to the timeframe / location of the game and the other Twilight Imperium novels?
Sil was a member of the L1Z1X Mindnet: one of the billions of cogs who spin the gears of an alien superconsciousness. Neural implants kept them in perfect sync with the groupmind. Sil (who uses she / they) saw themself as a perfect cell, in a perfect organ, in a perfect body. Right up until they fell out. A starship crash robbed them of this connection. But they still want to be part of the Mindnet. They work for the Mindnet now as one of its rare independent humanoid spies, able to pass through security gates that would detect Mindnet agents with functional implants.
The reason they can’t be reassimilated is that they’ve been infested with a mutated form of Arzuga fungus. The Arborec — a galaxy-spanning fungal consciousness — created Arzuga to facilitate communication with the galaxy’s other civilizations. Since the Arborec is a single mind, the idea of “communication” was entirely alien until recently. Arzuga colonizes the bodies of dead humanoids and allows the Arborec to speak through them.
But the Arzuga is still inside their brain, and possibly connected to the Arborec. Arzuga is supposed to only infect the dead, but this one infected Sil after the accident left them merely almost dead. This mutation and its ramifications is of deadly serious interest to people all over the galaxy, from the Galactic Council and Keleres to the Arborec itself, and places them in the center of a galaxy-spanning espionage operation.
Where did you get the idea for Twilight Imperium: Voice Of One?
One of the remits of Twilight Imperium is that (just about) every faction has to be someone’s protagonist. Including the very alien ones, like the Arborec, or the ones that just about everyone regards as a galactic threat and menace…like the L1Z1X Mindnet. I love writing from very alien perspectives, so right from the jump the Arborec and the Mindnet appealed to me.
Sil deeply, truly believes in the rightness of the Mindnet’s cause. They feel the weight of the eradication of the ancient Lazax Empire, the ancient tragedy that caused the Mindnet’s creation. They see in the new order of things a fundamental and irredeemable injustice. Though Sil will change throughout the story, I wanted to keep this perspective on the Twilight Imperium galaxy centered.
The game Twilight Imperium is a science fiction space opera board game, and thus all of the novels based on it are sci-fi space opera stories. But are there any other genres at work in Twilight Imperium: Voice Of One?
Voice Of One is an espionage story that grapples with space-opera-scale issues. Sil is undercover among the civilizations of the Galactic Council, just hoping to pick up scraps of information they can feed back to the Mindnet. They’re going to find a lot more than that.
So, how familiar were you with the game Twilight Imperium before you started writing Voice Of One?
I’ve always been a weird hermit shut-in, which has been great for my mental health (My “I’m not mad, it’s all of you who are mad!” theory continues to be buttressed by world events), but not as great for finding board game partners.
So I was mostly familiar with Twilight Imperium in passing. It is a game I remember seeing for decades in game stores. The box art has always been very striking. Prominently showcasing the Hacan on every edition gives you a good idea of the kind of weirdness you’re in for.
And how do you think that level of familiarity — or lack thereof, as the case may be — influenced what you wrote in Twilight Imperium: Voice Of One?
It influenced me into becoming familiar very quickly. Fantasy Flight and Aconyte were kind enough to provide me with an enormous amount of supplementary material. The Genesys Twilight Imperium RPG sourcebook is fabulous.
Speaking of influences, aside from the game itself, what else do you feel had the biggest influence on both what you wrote in Twilight Imperium: Voice Of One and how you wrote it? And I mean both literary and not.
I grew up with Star Trek, and so there’s always going to be a strain of it in any science fiction I write. My mom has a story about when I was a fussy infant and couldn’t get to sleep, she’d stay up with me watching reruns of the original series. I was doomed from the start(rek). It’s not a coincidence that Voice Of One‘s heart is a bitter, thorny ethical dilemma.
Now, the previous Twilight Imperium novels by Tim Pratt and Robbie MacNiven have each been part of their own subseries, with Pratt’s now available as a single volume called The Shattered Galaxy, while the first two of MacNiven’s, Empire Falling and Empire Burning, are the first two in his Twilight Wars trilogy. Is Voice Of One also part of a subseries, or is it a stand-alone novel?
Voice of One is a stand-alone novel set in the game’s “present.” It’s not part of a series in the traditional sense of an ongoing storyline, but it is pitched as part of a collection of novels focusing on individual factions.
Oh, and speaking of Robbie MacNiven’s Twilight Wars series, in writing Voice Of One, did you ever talk to Robbie to make sure you weren’t doing anything that might contradict what he had planned for the third and final book of his trilogy?
Robbie is great. In our Marvel novels [which include Palmgren’s Squirrel Girl Universe, Domino: Strays, Outlaw: Relentless, and The Siege Of X-41, as well as MacNiven’s X-Men: First Team], I did write storylines and characters that picked up after his writing, but that’s not the case this time.
Now, one of the things about Aconyte’s books — be they connected to Twilight Imperium or some other game — is that they always stand on their own. I, for instance, have read most of the Twilight Imperium novels, and both understood and enjoyed them, even though I’ve never played the game. Is it safe to assume that’s also true for Voice Of One?
One of the balancing acts of writing fiction in an established universe is keeping a story accessible for new readers and rewarding for those who are already immersed in the setting. I always aim to walk that line.
And then, on the flipside of that, what do you think people who play Twilight Imperium will get out of readingVoice Of One?
When I play any strategy game — especially anything from a zoomed-out, God’s-eye-view perspective — one of the things I love to do is tell myself stories about life on the ground level. What are the regimental legends of this one Civilization unit that fought in multiple wars through the centuries? Who are the drivers of the recon rover squadron I sent on a years-long expedition of the polar fungal blooms in Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri? What’s life like in this neighborhood in SimCity or Cities Skylines?
Every round of these games contain a million stories. For players of the board game, my goal is to fire up your imagination the next time you sit down to play. To give you a sense of some of the people that exist under the markers and tiles: what their lives are like, what they believe, and what’s at stake for them.
Finally, if someone enjoys Twilight Imperium: Voice Of One, and they’ve read the other Twilight Imperium novels, what sci-fi space opera novel of someone else’s would you suggest they check out?
Iain M. Banks’s novels, including but not limited to the Culture series, are some of the best of the high-technology, high-concept space opera you’ll find. Fiction on the scale of galactic empires.
