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Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/10/02/the-big-idea-seamus-sullivan/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57589

Greek mythology is a mythos that is full of despair, anguish, and characters that can’t seem to a catch a break. Author Seamus Sullivan brings us some of these familiar ancient characters in his debut novel, Daedalus is Dead. Follow along to see how Sullivan’s relationship to his son contributed to the inspiration of this classic myth retelling.

SEAMUS SULLIVAN:

Years ago, when I first tried to write about Daedalus in the form of a ponderous and contraction-free short story, Maria Dahvana Headley gave me some characteristically thoughtful line edits, and one note in particular stayed with me. She had gone back into my draft and added contractions, explaining that a lot of writers instinctively reach for “I am” rather than “I’m” when writing something set in antiquity, but at the expense of distancing the story from the reader. Contractions allow for intimacy, and intimacy is what the story demands.

Years later, I tried to write about Daedalus again. I had become a parent, and the first year of my son’s life overlapped with the first year of the global COVID-19 pandemic, a brutal police crackdown on protests, the January 6th insurrection, and other delights. I was deeply angry with men, with a society built to accommodate the worst impulses of men, and with myself for being part of it. With Headley’s note at the back of my mind, I framed the story as Daedalus’s direct address to his late son, Icarus. I’d worked in this mode before, a parent directly addressing their child. There was an assumption in there somewhere that any kid born in the present day would, before long, start observing the world and demanding that the adults explain themselves.

For me, Greek mythology’s appeal has always had something to do with grandeur, with the glory and tragedy of an imagined past, sure, but also with scale and awe and durability. Maybe that’s just how it feels when you read the stuff as a kid. Writing in the Mary Renault style wouldn’t work for me – I didn’t have the skill or the eye for anthropological detail to pull that off, and anyway there was no point in pretending I wasn’t doing the literary equivalent of shaking my fist at the world immediately outside my window. So most of my narration’s intimacy came from my own day-to-day, which largely consisted of carrying an inquisitive baby around and explaining things to him, and for the grandeur I went back to Homer.

Emily Wilson’s Odyssey translation had been out for a few years by then, so I went over passages from that and from my older, Stanley Lombardo Iliad translation. Those helped with the details of how royal households worked (slave labor and all), what funeral rites were like, and a general idea of how to convey that sense of grandeur in vernacular-friendly language that would pull readers into this imagined version of a bronze age society. Wilson’s Odyssey introduction was a great resource for social context and for how composition and performance of Homeric verse might have worked. In the spring of last year I got to see Wilson perform the opening lines of The Iliad for a packed New York Public Library audience, in the original Greek, with enviable gusto; I came away with a deeper appreciation for the artistry and energy that kept these texts alive, in performance and print, for millennia.

Magpie-like, I accumulated images and ideas from other sources. Much of the opening chapter, describing the escape from Crete and the fall of Icarus, comes from Ovid. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, an intensely affecting depiction of a mother’s search for her child, has a haunting image of an older woman seeking work at the village well as a nursemaid, and this influenced my back story for Naucrate, Daedalus’s wife and Icarus’s mother. (Naucrate has a name and a job description, household slave, in Pseudo-Apollodorus, but we don’t have much surviving information on her character beyond that.) I learned about an old tradition of reluctance to mention the king of the underworld by name, referring to him only through indirect titles, and worked that into the book as well. While Daedalus, the character, has an extremely dry sense of humor, I did my best to put some jokes in, because there are jokes and boasts and coarse insults in Homer, and because I find people do crack jokes when they’re under constant stress.

All this research made the book genuinely fun to write, even though it’s a book about things in the world that make me intensely sad and angry. I did my best to make the book fun to read as well. Only an egomaniac would seriously entertain the hope that his work will stick around as long as Homeric verse, but I do like to think about the comfort and collective enjoyment that audiences would have found in hearing very old myths performed and retold centuries ago, including the many, many versions of those myths that haven’t survived into the present day. If my own version can provide some of that enjoyment for you, if we can both shake our heads, together, at the terror and grotesquerie and grandeur of the world we inhabit right now, I’ll feel like I did my job. 

Daedalus is Dead: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Books-a-Million|Powell’s

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https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/10/02/the-big-idea-seamus-sullivan/

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Posted by Athena Scalzi

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/10/01/the-big-idea-beth-cato-7/

https://whatever.scalzi.com/?p=57574

You can’t judge a house by its paint job. Or by the nefarious things that have gone on inside said house in the past. Author Beth Cato takes us for a tour in the Big Idea for her newest novel, A House Between Sea and Sky. Follow along to see what lore this house holds.

BETH CATO:

Murder houses have feelings, too.

In the case of the titular House of my new cozy-literary fantasy A House Between Sea and Sky, those feelings include loneliness, anxiety, and some undeniable obsessive-compulsive tendencies. After all, it’s not easy to be a witch’s hut for centuries. One’s oven gets used for all sorts of sordid things.

But House has now been abandoned. For years it has lingered, essentially dozing in its precarious position on a cliff at the edge of a strange continent. But on this stormy night, it stirs awake as it recognizes something: a woman flavored by a magic even older than its own. House’s curiosity is piqued. It doesn’t try to hide itself from the woman’s eyes. It lets her come close. Even more, when the woman returns, dragging along a man limp with despair, House lets them both inside to take shelter from the raging rain and lightning.

As House describes the scene:

I am not their home, but I can be a refuge. I can, maybe, know the warmth of bodies and voices again, my hollowness less hollow.

I open my entry to them in invitation.

The year is 1926. The place: Carmel-by-the-Sea in California. The human point of view is that of the woman flavored by magic, forty-five-year-old Fayette Wynne. She is a scenarist for silent films. She’s struggling to catch up on her script-writing after the recent death of her beloved Ma. Fayette’s siblings are dead, too. Her grief is a boulder she can’t budge, though she truly does have one other family member left–the sentient sourdough starter dubbed Mother that her family has tended for decades. Mother’s divine healing powers were not adequate to heal Ma, though, and Fayette bristles with resentment.

Then there is the man Fayette rescues from the storm. Rex Hallstrom is a rising star in Hollywood, handsome and charismatic. But Rex has been forced to act through most every moment of the day, and the falseness of his life is eating away at him like acid. He needs help. He needs hope.

All of my other fantasy novels have been about high stakes: the world is in danger, the kingdom is in danger, that kind of thing. This is a different kind of book. The stakes are low and intimate. These people–and House is definitely a living soul and a person–need each other if they are to survive.

I invite you to step inside this world, too. You’ll find House to be the most accommodating of hosts. There will be a warm fire. Good, fresh sourdough bread. An incredible view. Perhaps some surprise company will arrive as well–after all, this is a witch’s house, and the unexpected should be expected. 

Just be sensitive about House’s feelings. It truly is striving to be more than a murder house of lore, but maaaaaybe it doesn’t always make the right choices. Just know that it is trying, just as we all attempt to get by, day to day. We all could use a little more care and compassion as we slog through this storm that we call life.

A House Between Sea and Sky: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Audible

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https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/10/01/the-big-idea-beth-cato-7/

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