Simon Tull

Welcome back, friend! Yesterday, I shared about A Mirage in the Memory, This book blends genres, creating a unique post-apocalyptic world with vampires, androids, and god-like entities. Today, I am excited to bring you this interview with Simon Tull! Let’s learn more about his scifi series! 🙂

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Get to know the author: Simon Tull

Hi Simon. Welcome to Armed with A Book. Please tell me and my readers about yourself.

Hi Kriti, thanks for interviewing me! I’m an indie Science Fantasy author and software engineer. I’ve been writing seriously now for 4 years, and just in the last few months I’ve started to publish my work. By serious, I mean that I get up somewhere between 4-6am every day and write until I start my day job at 9. 

The first series I’m publishing is the Slip Saga, for which my first book–a novella called A Mirage in the Memory–is a prequel. I’m launching Book 1 (A Spectre in the Stream) as a Kickstarter campaign on May 1st next year and I’m working hard to complete it. I’ve finished the 5th draft this morning as I write this, and expect to do 2-3 more to polish it off.

A Spectre in the Stream wasn’t the first book I wrote, however. That honour goes to a terrible manuscript that will remain nameless and unpublished–a portal fantasy involving elves and faux werewolves.

A Mirage in Memory is the prequel to a new series which is slated for release in May 2024. It’s a great introduction to the world in a shorter format but I have only ever seen prequels after the series has been out. I would love to know why you chose to release the prequel first. 

I wrote Mirage much later than Spectre–it’s actually the fourth book I’ve written. I wrote a first draft of another epic science fantasy series in between, one I hope to start publishing in 2025. 

I’d originally intended to publish Spectre and Mirage at the same time, but in August 2023 I learned of a new indie novella competition: The Speculation Fiction Indie Novella Championship, which had entries closing at the end of September. By that stage, I’d done two drafts of Mirage and felt it was fairly near to completion, and I had about 6 weeks before the closing date. I like a challenge and a deadline, so I pivoted from my plan and decided to go for it. Fortunately, my editor was prepared to accommodate me at such short notice and three drafts and two rounds of edits later, I made the date with a couple of days to spare.

You describe yourself as a software sorcerer by day and I felt the ease with which you described the technology in this book speaks to your knowledge. Tell me about the process of coming up with headgears and other technologies mentioned in this book. What does your research look like for things that don’t exist?

I’ve been working in software development for about 10 years now, which has been fairly wide-ranging, so extrapolating tech that might exist in a fantasy context like in the Slip Saga isn’t too much of a stretch for me. I’ve always enjoyed the Cyberpunk aesthetic and how it dips into horror with body modification and human-computer interaction. In my series we’ve got immortal vampires that can heal, so a VR device that drills through the skull and into the brain seemed like a cool idea to me. The Matrix is one of my favourite movies, and I took a lot of inspiration from the scene where Neo wakes in the real world, in particular.

I had originally thought A Mirage in the Memory would be a scifi novella but it is so much more than that. The post apocalyptic world that you have created also has creatures generally associated with fantasy but they aren’t really the focus of the plot which makes this a unique story. I am curious about the origins of this world. What was the initial idea? What was the Bloodscourge?

I’m glad you liked the blend of different genres. I had the initial idea while I was watching The Expanse. I don’t recall the episode, or why it sparked an idea, but I do remember that much. The original idea was simple: what do vampires do once they’ve eaten all the humans? The Slip Saga is my answer to that question.

In my world, I called vampires ‘vire’ instead, because I wanted to divorce my version of these creatures from the baggage they carry in popular culture, keep only the pieces I wanted to play with. Namely, a thirst for human blood, immortality, healing, and other special abilities.

The Bloodscourge is the event that wiped out humanity and created the vire in their place: it’s the vire pandemic. There’s more to come on this in future books 🙂

I enjoyed the variety of characters in your story. There are androids, augmented humans, ghostly computer programs, god-like entities that have a huge influence on the world in general. I want to know more about Thibault. How old is he? How did he end up in this situation?

Great! I’m glad you enjoyed them, because I enjoyed writing them. Thibault is physically around 30 years old, though like all surviving vire in the city of Nova, he’s lived for over 200 years.

I don’t want to be coy, but Thibault is one of the key characters through the rest of the Slip Saga, so you’ll be learning more about him in the following books, promise 🙂

I read the synopsis of the next book, A Spectre in the Stream, and I didn’t see any references to the characters of this book. Would you be able to hint (or name) who might make an appearance there?

There are several POV characters in Spectre, one of which is Thibault, but he’s not the protagonist. That’s a character named Prisma, who isn’t in Mirage. I don’t want to spoil anything about her, but suffice it to say, she doesn’t remember the last 200 hundred years, and the reason for that has had a profound effect upon her.

Some of the other notable characters from Mirage will also make an appearance again in Book 2 and onwards, including Condrite, Blink, Tyre, and of course, Reggie. They were too much fun to write to leave them by the wayside.

I loved the dialogue in this book. Do you have a favourite quote or scene in the book that you find yourself going back to?

Thanks so much! I work hard at good dialogue, so I’m glad it’s paid off. There are a lot of exchanges in there that I enjoy, but most of all, I do like a fun joke. Jupiter is one of the villains in Mirage, and he features a pair of augmented fists that shoot lightning. One of the side characters makes a quip about it that never fails to make me chuckle:

He raised a gleaming golden hand, flaring his fingers outward, palm up. From this close, it was clear both forearms were augmented, grafted below the elbow. The fingers retracted, disappearing into Jupiter’s hand one segment at a time, the rest of the hand following, sinking away into his wrist until the entire thing vanished, replaced by a gaping hole.

Electricity crackled around the opening.

“No wonder you’re so tense,” Tyre said. “Must be stressful to piss with one of those things gripping your todger.” He nodded at the legionaries behind them. “Or does one of them hold it for you instead?”

If readers could take one thing away from this book, what would you want it to be?

Pure enjoyment is my goal. I want readers to come away with the same feeling I had the first time I watched The Matrix: mind blown. If they enjoy some of the themes too, that’s great, but first and foremost I want it to be a cracking fun ride.

Please recommend three of your favourite post-apocalyptic novels.

It’s kind of cheating, but The Wheel of Time is a post-apocalyptic setting in a few senses, and that’s had the biggest impact on me as a writer, so that’s number 1. Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson is brilliant too, I studied several scenes in that book to improve my own writing skills. And for a more traditional post-apoc novel, I Am Legend by Richard Matheson was an enjoyable read, and very very different to the Will Smith movie.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

Thanks so much for the interview, and for enjoying my books. I hope you and your readers will follow along with the Kickstarter campaign next year!

Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me and sharing with my readers. 🙂

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Thanks for joining us! Learn more about Simon on his website. I hope you will check out A Mirage in the Memory on Goodreads if it is your kind of book. Read my review here.