Historical Fantasy
Date Published: September 1, 2024
Publisher: Roundfire Books
Capitán Cristóbal de Varga's drive for glory and gold in 1538
Peru leads him and his army of conquistadors into a New World that refuses
to be conquered. He is a man torn by life-long obsessions and knows this is
his last campaign. What he doesn't know is that his Incan allies led by the
princess Sarpay have their own furtive plans to make sure he never finds the
golden city of Vilcabamba. He also doesn't know that Héctor Valiente,
the freed African slave he appointed as his lieutenant, has found a portal
that will lead them all into a world that will challenge his deepest
beliefs. And what he can't possibly know is that this world will trap him in
a war between two eternal enemies, leading him to question everything he has
devoted his life to - his command, his Incan princess, his honor, his God.
In the end, he faces the ultimate dilemma: how is it possible to battle your
own obsessions . . . to conquer yourself?
INTERVIEW
Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?
Conquist asks the question: How do you stop grit of determination from becoming the destructiveness of obsession? The conquistadors’ lust for gold, glory and domination mirrors the modern world’s craving for fortune, fame and power. The answer the novel gives is that no goal is worth achieving at the expense of personal relationships.
If you had the chance to cast your main character from Hollywood today, who would you pick and why?
I wrote a movie screenplay for
Conquist in tandem with the novel. A few years ago, I sent it as part of my application to
Ron Howard’s Imagine Impact, which is described as “a first of its kind content accelerator program in film and television development”. My application was ultimately unsuccessful, but the questions that were asked in the application forced me to apply a laser-like lens to every aspect of
Conquist. One of the questions was who my preferred lead actor would be. My answer was Eric Bana. He can disappear into a role. I’ve seen him play both sensitive and ruthless characters. He can be dark, brooding, vulnerable and heroic, all at the same time.
When did you begin writing?
Did you have an author who inspired you to become a writer?
I wrote a Superman story when I was eight years old, made several copies (with illustrations) by hand, and then enlisted my friends to help me go door-to-door in the neighborhood and sell them for 2 cents each. We made enough money to share a large bag of candy. I tackled a novel a year later after having read Tolkien’s The Hobbit. A friend who was similarly inspired by the book and I planned a book we called The Journey Back about a creature in a fantasy world who fell into a river, was carried to the other side of the world and had to find his way back home. Of course, it had dwarves and dragons. Our hero, however, instead of being a hobbit was a zabbit. A crucial difference, we thought. I’ve still got the map we drew up. My father ran a printing business, and he bound a book with empty pages for me and I handwrote onto the pages. Unfortunately, it didn’t get past 3 or 4 chapters. Turns out writing a novel isn’t that easy. Who knew?
Tell us something in Conquist that might not be obvious to readers.
Conquist has been thoroughly researched and based on historical events. Cristóbal’s story mirrors Francisco Pizarro’s conquest of the Incan Empire. The Pizarro brothers were searching for Manco Incas’ hidden city of Vilcabamba in the Amazon at the same time that Cristóbal is searching for it in the Andes. Lieutenant Héctor Valiente is loosely based on the black conquistador Juan Valiente, a slave who convinced his owner to allow him to become a conquistador for four years as long as he kept a record of his earnings and returned them to his master.
I wanted Cristóbal’s diary entries to feel authentic, so as part of my research I read actual diaries of conquistadors such as The Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Diaz. I also read about the rise and fall of the Inca Empire in a number of books, plus books on Incan culture and beliefs. I wanted to make the battle scenes feel as real as possible, so I paid particular attention to the weaponry and tactics of both the conquistadors and the Incas.
The trick, of course, is to work these details into the story to make everything sound authentic without cluttering the narrative. The Incas didn’t use money, they had no written language, and in many ways, they treated the mummies of their ancestors as if they were still alive. The Spanish guns were not the effective weapons that they became in later centuries, and the conquistadors’ real battle advantages were their horses, dogs and armor. I think it’s also important for historical fantasy to fit into the known events of the period. Conquist had to be set precisely in 1538 because the search for Manco Inca and his hidden city of Vilcabamba happened that year. All these sorts of things become important plot points in Conquist and are not just window-dressing.
What motivates your writing?
I write to be heard. I came to the unavoidable realization at one point during the writing of Conquist that the diary that Cristóbal writes is an analogue of me writing the novel. Cristóbal says in his final diary entry:
I was once given to consider that which in life I most fervently strove for. In the honesty of my old age, I now accept that the answer does not lie in the command of men, nor in the honor my father held above all else. No, I now understand with the certainty of all my glorious and pitiful experiences that I value above all else that my words are heard. Even if no one saw the condor disappear, it existed.
Can you share a little bit about your current work or what is in the future for your writing?
The new novel I’m working on is called The Myriad. I usually like to play around with back cover blurbs to see what might intrigue potential readers. Here’s the current version of the blurb:
Many cities are spoken of as lost. The city of Myriad is the only one that is truly lost, not just to our world, but to all worlds.
There is a place between the worlds where all things are held in abeyance, where a pregnant nothingness reigns. This is where the lost city of Myriad drifts with the tides of chaos.
Every now and again the city comes into contact with a new world. A momentary juncture. This is the only time the inhabitants of Myriad can leave the prison of their walls. And leave they must, because nothing truly lives within the city’s walls bar the inhabitants themselves—and some say even they do not truly live as we do. All food and water must be taken from these worlds that randomly adjoin Myriad for a time.
Yet there are dangers in these worlds that are totally unknown to the inhabitants of Myriad. And when the nexus with these worlds is broken and an inhabitant is outside the walls, they will never be able to return because the city will vanish from that world forever.
And there is danger far greater than this for the unfortunates lost to their city in this way. Within the walls of Myriad, the inhabitants are immortal. Outside they become mortal.
So, the immortals inside the walls are doomed to eternally travel between a myriad of worlds, seeking to return to the world of their origin, to right the wrong that exiled them into the restless void, to find final peace.
The Myriad is the story of the mortal-born woman who brings them to that peace.
About the Author
Dirk Strasser’s epic fantasy trilogy The Books of
Ascension—Zenith, Equinox and Eclipse—was published in German
and English, and his short stories have been translated into several
languages. “The Doppelgänger Effect” appeared in the World
Fantasy Award-winning anthology Dreaming Down Under. His historical fantasy
novel Conquist was published in 2024. The serialized version of Conquist was
a finalist in the Aurealis Awards Best Fantasy Novel category. Dirk’s
screenplay version of Conquist won the Wildsound Fantasy/Sci-Fi Festival
Best Scene Reading Award and was a featured finalist in the Cinequest Film
& Creativity Festival and the Creative World Awards. He is the co-editor
of Australia’s premier science fiction and fantasy magazine, Aurealis,
and was a judge on the 2024 Sydney Science Fiction Film Festival Screenplay
Awards. Dirk has been a high school teacher, a writer of best-selling
textbooks, an educational software developer, a publishing manager, and a
soccer club president.
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