character – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Agency Under Tyranny in Bringing Stella Home

Bringing Stella Home is a character-driven military science fiction novel that asks a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to have agency when freedom has already been taken away? In a universe shaped by conquest and domination, the novel explores whether choice still matters when the best options have been stripped away. Rather than framing agency as escape or rebellion, the story focuses on the quieter, harder work of choosing who you will be under tyranny. Rather than centering on battles or political intrigue, the story is driven by character choices and moral tension within a military science fiction setting.

Where the Idea Came From

This theme grew directly out of my fears as an older brother. Growing up, I was deeply protective of my younger sisters, and the idea of not being able to save the people I love has always terrified me. That pushed the story away from a simple rescue narrative and toward a deeper exploration of agency, responsibility, and moral choice under tyranny.

How Agency Under Tyranny Shapes the Story

Stella’s storyline is where this theme takes its clearest form. Captured by the Hameji and absorbed into a system built on hierarchy, conquest, and dehumanization, she loses nearly every form of conventional freedom. She cannot leave. She cannot reshape the system that controls her. And yet, the novel insists that her choices still matter. Her agency survives not through open defiance, but through the moral boundaries she maintains, even when compliance would make her life easier or safer.

James’s journey reflects a different facet of the same theme. His actions are driven by loyalty, love, and a desire to restore what has been lost, but the story steadily challenges the idea that agency means control or correction. As events unfold, he is forced to confront the reality that respecting another person’s agency—especially under tyranny—may require restraint, humility, and the willingness to accept choices he cannot fully understand or direct.

What Agency Under Tyranny Says About Us

The theme of agency under tyranny speaks to a difficult truth about human nature: we do not always choose our circumstances, but we remain responsible for who we become within them. Tyranny works by narrowing choices until obedience feels inevitable, offering safety or comfort in exchange for moral surrender. Bringing Stella Home suggests that agency persists even in constrained forms, and that the decisions people make under pressure—often unseen and uncelebrated—still shape their identity, integrity, and future. This is a story for readers who are less interested in easy victories than in moral resilience, responsibility, and the cost of choosing well.

Why This Theme Matters to Me

I care about this theme because it reflects how life often actually works. We don’t always get clean victories or heroic options. Sometimes we are forced to live inside broken systems, painful relationships, or irreversible losses. Writing Bringing Stella Home was my way of wrestling with the belief that dignity, responsibility, and moral choice still matter—even when the world refuses to be fair, and even when doing the right thing doesn’t lead to the outcome we might hope for.

Where to Get the Book

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Fantasy from A to Z: W is for Worldbuilding

What is the biggest thing that sets fantasy apart from all other genres? Without a doubt, it has to be worldbuilding. In every other genre (even science fiction, to some extent), the writer can get away with a loose or surface-level understanding of the world. But in order to do fantasy right, you have to build the world from the ground up, and include such an immersive and visceral level of detail that the reader feels like it’s a real world that they can lose themselves in. That is the feeling that readers want when they pick up a fantasy book.

At the same time, I think that most writers put too much emphasis on worldbuilding. It’s become trendy in writerly circles to talk about worldbuilding, almost as if it’s something you do for its own sake. In the best books, though—even in the best fantasy books—the worldbuilding is always in service to the story, and not the other way around.

For many of us writers, the act of dreaming up a world is the thing that immerses us the most in it. Daydreaming about our fantasy worlds and working out all of the details about it—that’s often the fun part, and the thing that got us into writing fantasy in the first place. But it doesn’t translate very well to the page. The things that seemed so cool to us when we were dreaming them up often come across as dry and boring when we write them out in a huge info dump.

In order for a reader to feel immersed in the world, they need to have a character that they can follow through it. The character’s experience of the world becomes the reader’s experience. But the character needs to be in motion—they need to have some sort of goal or objective that they’re working toward, even if they don’t consciously realize it yet. And it needs to be a struggle for them, at least on some level. Even in cozy fantasy, where the stakes are typically pretty low, the characters still have to put some effort into getting the things they want.

That’s because characters show us who they really are through the trials and struggles that they face. Just like in real life, hard times make us see what people are made of. Without that, readers have a difficult time connecting with the characters through whose eyes we want to show them our fantasy worlds. It’s through a character’s struggle that we find that we can relate to them.

Another thing I’ve noticed, particularly in some recent big-name traditionally published fantasy, is that the viewpoint characters are often just terrible people. If I met them in real life, I often think that I would find them petty, narcissistic, and repulsive. At best, they are amoral, and at worst, they are little better than the villains who oppose them—and yet, from the way they’re written, it’s clear that we’re supposed to latch onto them simply because they are the main character.

As a reader, that doesn’t work for me. If I’m going to connect with a character deeply enough to get that immersive fantasy experience, I want them to either be the kind of person I can admire, or the kind of person I feel like I can hang out with. Preferably both. And if the character is going to do something morally repulsive early on in the book, I need to see them wrestle with the ethics of it first, and perhaps feel some remorse afterward. Otherwise, it’s going to throw me out of the book.

Anything that throws the reader out of the book is also going to kill that immersive experience, rendering all that worldbuilding utterly ineffectual. In some ways, the reader first has to feel immersed in the characters before they can feel immersed in the world.

This is why the characters in the best fantasy books often have more depth and nuance to them than the characters in any other genre. When the book is set in our own familiar world, the characters themselves are often larger than life. The heroes are billionaires or ex-Navy SEALs, the love interests are supermodels or billionaires, and the villains are criminal masterminds or rival billionaires. But in fantasy, the larger-than-life element is the world itself, so the characters (or at least the viewpoint characters) often feel much more like real people, so as to ground us in the story.

I’ve often heard people say that worldbuilding is a bit like an iceberg, in that only 10% or so should be visible. But I think it’s more precise to say that worldbuilding should be grounded in the character (or characters) through whose eyes we get to see it. Of course, those characters are grounded in the conflict or plot of the story, since that’s what shows us who they really are. And the plot itself is grounded in time and space, which brings us back full circle to setting and worldbuilding. So ultimately, it’s all a virtuous cycle.

I don’t think I’ve ever found an author who does character better than Ursula K. Le Guin. I haven’t read much of her fantasy, but I did read Powers, and I felt so totally immersed in that world because I felt like I knew the main character even better than I know myself. It was an incredible reading experience, just like the best of her science fiction, which I adore.

Brandon Sanderson also tends to buck the current trend of morally ambiguous main characters who never really earn our sympathy or admiration. In almost all of his books, his protagonists strike me as good people—the kind that I can admire and hang out with. That fact, combined with how his books tend to be much cleaner than most contemporary fantasy, go a long way toward explaining his tremendous success (though of course, Sanderson’s greatest strength is his ability to write killer endings).

Bottom line, the best worldbuilding in fantasy is only as good as the characters through whom we experience it. Worldbuilding should always serve the story, and not the other way around.

Fantasy from A to Z: All Posts

2019-09-19 Newsletter Author’s Note

This author’s note originally appeared in the September 19th edition of my author newsletter. To subscribe to my newsletter, click here.

It’s September, which means (among other things) that it’s time to revisit my business plan and update it for the next year. Every January 1st, I print out a new and revised copy of my business plan, which provides a great opportunity to evaluate my efforts and hone in on the things I need to do better.

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on the section titled “What I Write.” In this year’s business plan, it was a pretty straightforward breakdown of all of the series in my catalog. But for next year, I took a few steps back to address things like what is a Joe Vasicek book? or what are some of my books’ recurring themes? or what kind of science fiction and fantasy do I write specifically, and how does my work contribute to the genre?

The exercise really got me to think about why I write. In the day to day life of a writer, it’s very easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. Deadlines and daily word count goals keep the focus on the page right in front of you, and when you do think ahead it’s usually just to the next chapter. But without taking time to step back and look at the bigger picture, it’s easy to lose that creative drive, or settle for second-rate work.

So what is a Joe Vasicek book? I hope it’s a book that’s memorable and meaningful. It may be dark, but never dismal. It may push you out of your comfort zone, but it also leaves you feeling rejuvenated and inspired. It features interesting characters wrestling with complex ethical dilemmas and struggling to do the right thing as best as they know how.

What are some of my books’ recurring themes? The balance between liberty and responsibility is a huge one. Actions have consequences, and true liberty is taking ownership of those consequences as well as your actions. Another is the sanctity of sex, contrasting selfish gratification with the affirmation of commitment and love. The yearning for God is another recurring theme, with a great deal of religious diversity in the starfaring civilizations of my books. Another theme I keep coming back to is the call of the frontier.

I’m curious, though, to hear what you guys think. What do you think makes a Joe Vasicek book? What tropes or recurring themes have you enjoyed in my books? As a writer, I’m often too close to my own work to see what’s obvious to everyone else. What do you think is my biggest contribution to the genre?

And you call yourself a writer??

So I got into another online political debate on a writer’s forum last month. Shocking, I know. This one started with a discussion of political correctness and an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, and quickly devolved into an argument about corporate censorship, gun control, Trump, and every other controversial issue in politics. Needless to say, it didn’t take long for people to cry reee and let loose the frogs of war.

That’s not the interesting part, though. Before the discussion devolved into a dumpster fire, I asked one of my more outspoken opponents a simple question:

I’m curious, Perry. Are you capable of seeing the world through the eyes of someone who disagrees with you politically?

To which he responded:

I used to be, before they started endorsing hate speech and supporting authoritarian sociopaths. Now I’ve got no patience for people who believe in a society built on a foundation of inequality and selfishness.

Now, perhaps this was naive of me, but I honestly was looking forward to the challenge of trying to reflect this guy’s own views back to him. I was looking forward to him doing the same for me. After all, isn’t that what writers are supposed to do? Put ourselves in a character’s head, and show that character’s perspective?

It blows my mind that people who call themselves writers can have absolutely no interest in seeing things through the eyes of the people they disagree with. Even if those people really are evil (and in almost all cases, they really aren’t), it’s still a good idea to study how they see the world, because some of the most interesting characters are evil to the core.

Anyone who takes this stance must write horribly dull books. Their bad guys and villains must be one-dimentional cardboard cutouts, or pyromaniacal straw men. The most compelling antagonists always believe that they are the heroes of their own stories, just like everyone else, and the more compelling the story they tell themselves, the more interesting the character.

For example, consider King Candy from Wreck-it Ralph. He was absolutely a villain, but he had a very compelling story for why he was right to keep Vanellope from racing. Never mind that he was an imposter in what was actually Vanellope’s game.

In any case, I think that if we want to write well, we absolutely need to do our best to see the world through the eyes of the people we disagree with. Even if they’re wrong. Especially if they’re wrong. And if our own views are so rigid that we cannot bring ourselves to do this, then maybe we should take a good, hard look in the mirror. After all, how can we hope to change the world if we can’t—or won’t—change ourselves?

Trope Tuesday: Death Seeker

The Death Seeker is a character who wants to die, but for whatever reason isn’t willing to commit outright suicide. The TVtropes page has a good summary:

At some point in the past, some characters have had a traumatic experience, found themselves dishonored, committed a crime they could not repay, or lost everything worth living for. For whatever reason, rather than turning to suicide, they went off seeking battles to fight, hoping to find an enemy who would kill them, and achieve an honorable, heroic, awesome, or otherwise acceptable death, sometimes going as far as outright surrendering and offering their life to their enemies.

I’ve written a surprising number of these characters, but more often than not they end up living instead of dying. Quite often, they have a mentor who used to be a death seeker themselves, who makes them promise to find a reason to keep on living.

Escapist fiction is fun, but I like to read stories that are meaningful as well. The two are not mutually exclusive. When the protagonist is a death seeker, the question “what is worth living for?” tends to be a major driver for the story.

One character who’s very much on my mind right now is Mara Soladze from Sons of the Starfarers. A refugee turned marine, she has a traumatic experience in Comrades in Hope that very nearly pushes her over the despair event horizon. She can’t just give up and die, though, because there are people depending on her. As she climbs up the ranks from first mate, to captain, and finally to commodore, that tension never goes away.

Probably the biggest difference between a death seeker and someone who’s simply suicidal is that the death seeker is looking for something to die for. They’re much more likely to make a heroic sacrifice or go out in a Bolivian army ending.

But if something is worth dying for, isn’t it also worth living for? That is ultimately the question.

Trope Tuesday: Only the Chosen May Wield

So I’m bringing back the Trope Tuesday posts, but with a little twist: instead of talking about the trope itself and what I like / don’t like about it, I’m going to talk about how I used that trope in one of my books. And since The Sword Keeper is currently up for preorder, I’m going to spend the next few weeks using examples from it.

Perhaps the most central trope in the book is Only the Chosen May Wield. In the first chapter, Tamuna Leladze discovers that she is the Chosen One when a mysterious stranger arrives at her aunt’s tavern, carrying a cool sword. Unbeknownst to her, the sword is enchanted and carries the skills and memories of all the people who have wielded it. She soon learns that she is the last sword bearer of prophecy—which comes as a huge shock, since as a common tavern girl, she’s really not cut out to be a warrior.

While the book mostly plays this trope straight, there are a couple of other complications that give it some depth. First, the sword itself is an actual character. It speaks to Tamuna through the psychic link that she establishes with it, and when she sleeps, it carries her to a mountain sanctuary where she’s able to talk with it like another person. The sword becomes something of a mentor to her, sharing skills and memories as quickly as she is able to receive them (which is never quickly enough).

Second, while Tamuna never wanted to be the Chosen One, one of the members of her party did, and struggles with feelings of jealousy because of it. This becomes especially complicated because this character’s chief motivation is honor, and he’s put in a position where he has to act as a trainer/bodyguard for Tamuna until she comes into her own. It doesn’t help that he’s only a few years older than her.

I suppose there is a third complication: the fact that Tamuna can’t (or shouldn’t) wield the sword until she has been physically trained for it. Several times, Imeris tells her that he can’t share all of his knowledge of swordplay with her, because she isn’t yet strong enough. Otherwise, she’s liable to injure herself, because her body isn’t capable of executing all of the strikes and parries and ripostes that she knows how to execute in her mind. So, while no one else can wield the sword Imeris, the one person who can isn’t yet capable of doing so.

It makes for an interesting dynamic. Stories tend to get boring when things are too easy for the Hero, and in The Sword Keeper, very little comes easy for Tamuna. In fact, one of the recurring questions she asks is how in the heck she became the Chosen One in the first place. I won’t spoil it for you by revealing whether or what she discovers by the end.

The Sword Keeper comes out in twenty-five days! Preorder it now!

The Sword Keeper

$12.99eBook: $4.99

Author: Joe Vasicek
Series: The Twelfth Sword Trilogy, Book 1
Genres: Epic, Fantasy
Tag: 2017 Release

Tamuna Leladze always dreamed of adventure, but never expected to answer its call. That changes when a wandering knight arrives at her aunt's tavern. He is the keeper of a magic sword that vanished from the pages of history more than a thousand years ago. The sword has a mind and a memory, and it has chosen Tamuna for purpose far greater than she knows.

More info →

$1 off the ebook with coupon code: BUY DIRECT

FREE ebook when you buy the audiobook direct!

FREE ebook when you buy the paperback direct!

Character Sheet Template

I’ve had such a ridiculously hard time lately trying to look up old characters, either from half-finished WIPs that I’ve recently picked up again, or from books I plan to publish but need to give a character description for the cover artist to work from. My Google-fu is pretty good, but a text search will only take you so far.

So yesterday, I put together a rough template for a character sheet. I plan to fill one out for every major character in my WIPs from now on.

====================
CHARACTER SHEET:
====================

FULL NAME:

AGE:
HEIGHT:
WEIGHT:
BUILD:
SKIN:
HAIR:
EYES:
OTHER:
MYERS-BRIGGS:
POLITICS:
SOCIAL CLASS:
RELIGION:
EDUCATION:
OCCUPATION:
RELATIONS:
==========
BACKSTORY:

============
MOTIVATIONS:

=======================
STRENGTHS & ADVANTAGES:

==================
FLAWS & HANDICAPS:

================
SYMPATHETIC HOW?

Larry Correia on creating “offensive” characters

Larry Correia has a fantastic post up on the pitfalls of political correctness when writing fictional characters. He not only nails it on the head, he takes a nail that’s been twisted in three different directions and rams it into the wood with just a couple of well-placed taps. Seriously, if you’re interested in writing at all, you should check the whole post out.

The main gist of it can be summed up by this quote:

Smart writers are going to focus on entertainment. They’re probably going to offend everybody at some point. But at least they won’t be boring while they do it.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again, the unforgivable sin for writers is being boring. As a writer you can get away with damned near anything as long as you are entertaining a big enough audience.

There is a contingent of readers out there who exist only to nitpick and bitch. There aren’t that many of them, but they make up for it by being loud. Many authors are under the mistaken impression that you can make these readers happy. You can’t. At best you can appease them. Temporarily. But you will cross their invisible line sometime and they will get all sorts of outraged.

The latest person to get outraged was Melissa Harris Perry, who denounced Star Wars because Darth Vader was (and yet at the same time wasn’t) black. Seriously. It’s like she saw this clip and didn’t realize it was satire:

But I digress.

The reason it’s impossible to please politically correct SJW-types is because the way that they signal their virtue to other members of their tribe is by finding something to be outraged about. This is a consequence of their belief that the only way to fix society is through social revolution, a point that Dennis Prager deconstructs quite effectively. It’s all about how loud they can scream.

As Larry points out, trying to placate these perpetually outraged people is a game you can’t win—not unless you’re already a member of their tribe. This ironically makes them far more prejudiced than most of the people they’re so outraged at. When was the last time you heard the word “white” used as an insult? Has the word “cisgender” ever not been used as an epithet? “Privileged” is another one—without knowing anything about you as an individual, they have already passed judgment and despise you.

Again, this is why I support the Sad Puppies: because they have the courage to stand against these perpetually outraged types who would tear down everything in SF&F that they can find offense with. The most imaginative genre in fiction is no place for self-appointed thought police.

There is one important area where I disagree with Larry. He rejects the Bechdel test out of hand, where I think it still has value. As a litmus test, I totally agree with him: I’m against any kind of a litmust test for stories. But from a writing perspective, I think it can still be a very useful tool.

The Bechdel test is something that I usually have in the back of my mind when I write: not out of fear of offending the perpetually outraged, but in order to write more complex and interesting characters who can stand as heroes of their own stories. I don’t think we’re at odds on that point, since Larry himself says the same thing in his discussion of how to write a strong antagonist. To that extent, I personally find the test to be useful.

The point is, if you want to be a successful writer, don’t try to please everyone. As soon as you start to experience success, someone will inevitably take offense with you just to bring you down a notch. Don’t let them get to you. In the words of Brigham Young:

He who takes offense when no offense is intended is a fool, and he who takes offense when offense is intended is a greater fool.

Why I stopped watching House of Cards

I started watching House of Cards a couple of weeks ago, and really got into it for a while. As longtime readers of this blog will remember, I spent a semester in DC at a high-powered K street internship, and was thoroughly disgusted by what I found there. House of Cards is all about the sleazy back-room political machinations of scrupulously ambitious people, so it gave me a lot of satisfaction to watch them all screw with each other.

Kevin Spacey’s performance in particular is absolutely fantastic. Periodically throughout the show, he breaks the fourth wall and turns toward the camera to give a monologue about the nature of political power. It’s such a characteristic part of the show that they spoofed it at the 2013 Grammys.

By the start of the third season, though, I started to have some misgivings. At various points in the show, I asked myself who my favorite character was, as a way of analyzing the writing. In the first season, I had several favorites. In the second season, those characters either died or did things that made me hate them. By the start of the third season, I didn’t like any of the characters—I only hated them in varying degrees.

The only potential exception to that was Senator Mendoza, the main antagonist of the third season who sets himself up as the Republican nominee for president. While all of the main characters consider him an asshole, that’s mostly because he doesn’t honor any of the back-room deals and secret combinations that they do. But since the story was setting him up to go head-to-head with Frank Underwood, I could tell early on that things wouldn’t end well for him.

The main reason I stopped watching, though, was because of all the gratuitous sex. Don’t get me wrong—I’m not one of those people who throws a book across the room the moment sex is acknowledged as part of the human experience. I’ve read and enjoyed (and even written) plenty of books where sex is an important part of the story. But when it becomes gratuitous—in other words, when it no longer serves the story—that’s when I get tired of it.

In order to do sex well, I think it needs to 1) convey an important facet of someone’s character (for example, Kirk in Star Trek), 2) serve an important plot point, or 3) impact the character arc in some important way. If the story can hold together just fine without the sex, then the sex is actually a sign of weak writing. Throwing it in just to titilate or hook the audience is like using adverbs to convey emotion: if the writing was strong enough to begin with, you wouldn’t have to do that.

So without getting into spoilers, that’s why I checked out of House of Cards. I hated all the characters, the writing was getting weaker, and the sex was too gratuitous.

Where’s SONS OF THE STARFARERS: BOOK IV?

So it’s been several months since I released Strangers in Flight (Sons of the Starfarers: Book III), and I’ve already gotten some flak from people waiting impatiently for Book IV: Friends in Command. Some of you may be wondering about that yourself, considering how I wrote and released the first three books within a couple of months of each other.

Well, here’s what’s going on. I wrote Friends in Command a couple of months ago and sent it out to my test readers, hoping that they would enjoy it. Many of them did, but they pointed out some problems that required a major rewrite. Essentially, I had put the entire novel in one character’s point of view, but there were plot points that happened outside of her point of view that made that not work.

So I went back and did a major revision, throwing in Aaron as the secondary POV character. And the plot points turned much smoother. But when I sent it out to a second round of test readers, they told me that it felt too much like a bridge story—that something was still missing. It wasn’t that the book was broken, or that the story didn’t come together properly. The story was good, but the book wasn’t as satisfying as I wanted it to be.

Now, Friends in Command is part four in a nine-part series, so in a lot of ways it really is a bridge. But I want this story to be more than that—to be strong enough to stand on its own, and not just set things up for the later books. Kind of like how Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes back sets things up for Jedi, but is an amazing movie in its own right (arguably the best one in the whole franchise). So with the new feedback, I identified some character elements that I needed to develop, and went back to work.

So far in the series, each book has centered around a different character. The first book, Brothers in Exile, focused on Isaac, the older and more responsible brother. The second book, Comrades in Hope, focused on Aaron, the younger brother who is eager for a chance to prove himself. Strangers in Flight revolved around Reva, the girl that they rescued in the first book, and Friends in Command revolves around Mara, the close friend and confidante that Aaron makes in book two.

The main thing is that I’m doing all I can to make this book as great as possible. I could have pushed it out a couple of months ago just for the sake of putting it out quickly, but I didn’t want to do that until I knew I’d written a quality book. So don’t be worried that I’ve dropped the ball, or that I’ve abandoned the series—I definitely have not! I’m just hard at work making sure it’s done right.

If you’ve been eagerly awaiting the next Sons of the Starfarers book, the good news is that I think I’m just about ready to release it. I’m finishing up with the third round revisions today, and I feel really good about it. I’m still going to send it out for one last test reading pass, just to make sure, and if everything’s good I’ll send it out to my editor before the end of the month. My cover designer is already working on the cover, and my editor says he should have a slot open very soon.

So if all goes well, I’ll put Friends in Command up for pre-order in the first or second week of April. The pre-order price will be $.99, with a tentative release date of May 1st. If things don’t go well, I may have to do another revision pass, but I’ll still do my best to release the book by June.

Six months without a new release is far, far too long. Fortunately, I have some other books coming down the pipeline, such as Heart of the Nebula, a full-length novel and direct sequel to Bringing Stella Home. With luck, that one will be out before the end of the year. And I’m about halfway through with The Sword Keeper, another awesome novel that I think you guys are really going to enjoy.

Lots of stuff going on! I’d better get back to work, but don’t worry—the books are coming!

Tag: character