CIVILIAN READER interviews Brennan.

Your new novel, DRIFTWOOD, will be published soon by Tachyon. It looks really interesting: How would you introduce it to a potential reader?

The tagline is “where worlds go to die,” but that sounds a little grim, doesn’t it? Driftwood is a setting composed of the fragments of broken worlds, brought together by some unknown force. Driftwood the novel is a fix-up of short stories previously written in that setting, with a new novelette and a frame story to link all the pieces together. If you feel like there might be a thematic connection between the setting and the form of the novel, well, you’re not wrong!

Also at CIVILIAN READER, Brennan shares an annotated excerpt.

In the days before their world shattered, crumbled, and finally fetched up against that cluster of old realities known as Driftwood, they were called the Valraisangenek.

This is where it all started. The short story “Driftwood,” being the very first one I wrote in this setting, is different from the others. Whereas everything else except one flash story are written from the third-person perspective of other characters, “Driftwood” shifts between third (which you’ll see later in this excerpt) and first, the latter from the perspective of Last, the thread binding these pieces together. Because it’s the odd one out, and because this story begins with a clear orientation into the setting, I put it first in the novel.

One of their scholars once spent a week lecturing me on that name alone, before I was allowed to learn anything else. Valraisangenek: echoing their once-proud world of Valrassuith, “The Perfect Circle”—itself based on the ancient root word of velar, “totality”—and their race’s legendary founder Saneig, “Chosen of San,” chosen of the Supreme Goddess, from whom they were all descended (genkoi). A name full of meaning, for those who know how to read it. But most people think the name of the Valraisangenek is too long and difficult to be worth remembering, especially when there are so few of them left. These days, everyone just calls them the Greens.

So admittedly, this is a bigger wodge of exposition than I would normally put so early in a story. But the point is to make a contrast with where it ends: hey, here’s all this complex stuff… which pretty much everybody has now chucked out the window, because they’re in Driftwood, and that kind of thing rarely survives here.

On the podcast THE WORLDSHAPERS, Edward Willett interviews Brennan.