Fiction Fans

Bonus: Gods of Dust by Bryan S. Glosemeyer

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After our interview with Bryan about his Shattered Gates universe, we reconvened to talk about his short story Gods of Dust, and also bring up some of our thoughts that were, as they say, "more of a comment than a question."

Check out our Patreon for the rest of the conversation.


Thanks to the following musicians for the use of their songs:

- Amarià for the use of “Sérénade à Notre Dame de Paris”
- Josh Woodward for the use of “Electric Sunrise”

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License


Lilly:

Hello and welcome to Fiction Fans, a podcast where we read books and other words too. I'm Lily

Sara:

And I'm Sarah.

Lilly:

and today we'll be discussing Gods of Dust by Brian S. Glosemeyer and have a little bit of a follow up conversation to his Shattered Gates universe as a whole. We did interview him recently, but it turns out there are some things that I have opinions on that aren't actually questions.

Sara:

That we both have opinions on, to be fair.

Lilly:

Yes, it's so funny when we were making our notes for that interview we had to keep crossing stuff off with the note This isn't a question

Sara:

Which is not really an unusual thing for us in our interviews.

Lilly:

No, and we do let a few slip in there This is more of a comment than a question, but I think it's only fair to try to keep that to a minimum.

Sara:

Yes.

Lilly:

So we couldn't help ourselves. Plus, he has a short story, Gods of Dust, in that universe, which is for free if you subscribe to his newsletter. So we didn't get a chance to talk about that at all. And now it's time. But before we get into that, what's something good that happened recently?

Sara:

Something good that happened recently is I should have prepared for this.

Lilly:

You knew it was coming.

Sara:

I didn't know it was coming. It always comes. I have harvested some onions from my yard. I don't know if it was really time for them to be harvested. I don't know when onion harvesting really is but they were starting to bloom, so I pulled them out of the ground, and they look like onions. Well, actually, they look more like shallots. They might be shallots, to be fair.

Lilly:

I was gonna ask what kind of onion. We planted a bunch of green onions this year which is what normal people call shallots. Oh no, not shallots. I was thinking chives. That's the one I was making fun of you for.

Sara:

No, but chives and green onions are totally different.

Lilly:

Doesn't matter. I'm gonna use the same word for both of them and you can't stop me.

Sara:

well, I can't stop you, but they, they are actually genuinely very different. And I don't think that normal people call chives green onions or vice versa.

Lilly:

But no, shallots are the like, the small, I know, I can now picture what you're talking about.

Sara:

And I'm thinking that I'm going to make pickled onions

Lilly:

Ooh, I've only pickled red onions because

Sara:

I mean, these are, these are red, so,

Lilly:

I mean, I like onions and I like pickles, so I feel like you can't go wrong.

Sara:

presumably it'll work. I have had pickled, like, yellow onion in like a melange of pickles. So, I think it'll work, even if they're not the traditionally pickled onions.

Lilly:

Did I have a good thing? I thought Oh! My good thing is really stupid.

Sara:

And my good thing wasn't.

Lilly:

No, mine's worse. So I'm on my fourth playthrough of yeah, fourth playthrough of Baldur's Gate 3, and I have finally successfully romanced the druid character. The yeah, I've been looking forward to that for four playthroughs now. I did not think it was going to work. The relationship level his character had with my character was not that high, but apparently he's easy, so that works out. And that's my good thing. See, it's dumber than yours. You grew a plant. You created life.

Sara:

It's true, I did.

Lilly:

What are you drinking today?

Sara:

I have some hojicha tea. I guess I don't have to say tea that's in the hojicha.

Lilly:

It's useful context for everyone who doesn't speak whatever language that is.

Sara:

Japanese.

Lilly:

And what is that? Not Japanese. Hojicha,

Sara:

the, the tea. It's a green tea. It's very, like, I don't know. It has kind of a little bit of a smoky barley flavor to it. But it's a, it's a green tea.

Lilly:

yeah, that was the information I was looking for. Thank you.

Sara:

You're welcome.

Lilly:

And have you read any good books recently?

Sara:

I have actually been doing some subjective chaos reading. I am still making my way through what was it? The 10 percent Thief. I'm about 73 percent now. And I'm not sure I'm actually liking it anymore. Like, the pace is, the pace is picking up a little bit. It's not that it's a bad book, it's just I don't know, it seems a little surface level so far. Like, because We haven't had All of the chapters have been from someone else's point of view. Like, there's been no repeats. So it's hard to really live with any of the characters.

Lilly:

Hmm.

Sara:

And I think that's just maybe this format of novel doesn't work for me as well. And things are starting to pick up plot wise, because, like, even though we're getting in the heads of all of these different people, like, you are kind of circuitously coming around to the plot of the novel.

Lilly:

Interesting. Well, maybe the ending will bring it back around.

Sara:

Maybe. I've got 25 percent left, so that's certainly enough time. Yeah, certainly enough time.

Lilly:

Yeah. I have not read anything that has not been for the podcast. It has been a sprint.

Sara:

It has been.

Lilly:

Yeah. Anyway. It's a good thing I haven't been able to sleep for the last couple of nights. Because otherwise, I don't think I would have finished this week's book in time. Anyway. Bye. Bye. All of that is great and wonderful, but I did read Gods of Dust and it was quite good. It was interesting how different it felt from,

Sara:

before we actually start talking about it, though we should say up front that this will have spoilers. This conversation will have spoilers, obviously, for Gods of Dust. It's a 20 page short story. We're not going to try to segment that out into spoilers and non spoilers, but it's also going to have spoilers for the Shattered Gates series as a whole. So if you don't want to get spoiled for things that happen in either book one or book two, maybe this is not the conversation that you should be listening to just yet.

Lilly:

yeah, absolutely. Although I do think these, in particular, are books that, well, I don't know. I feel like we have a whole conversation about the nature of spoilers. And when they do and don't matter.

Sara:

I'm pretty sure that we have talked about that before. Yes.

Lilly:

Gods of Dust takes place long before the events of Before the Shattered Gates of Heaven, which is the first book in the Shattered Gates series. But it sort of sets up some background information in Beyond the Gates Infernal. That's the second book's title, right? Beyond the Gates Infernal. Okay. It sets up some background events that you did. What order did you read it in? Because you read the short story before our interview with Brian.

Sara:

I did, but I had already finished Beyond the Gates Infernal,

Lilly:

Gotcha.

Sara:

so I, I read the first book. The, the two main books. And then I had a little bit of time before our interview. So I was like, well, I'll read the short story.

Lilly:

Yeah. So I would say there are two major things that get referenced in the Gates Infernal that are sort of delved into or explained in Gods of Dust. Okay. which is the copy paste virus, which, can I say, amazing concept, A love it. I

Sara:

was really interesting.

Lilly:

And then we also get a little bit more information about gestalts, which are when consciousnesses absorb each other. Is that the simplest way to explain it? not just absorb, but like incorporate.

Sara:

yeah, like kind of become a conglomeration.

Lilly:

And I say consciousnesses, we see this happen in this very cool sci fi setting because it's been established that people can kind of upload their personality and consciousness to computers and then have like, I don't know, what would you call that?

Sara:

Copies of themselves.

Lilly:

Yeah, but they're all also like webbed together, right? It's not cloning,

Sara:

Right.

Lilly:

you just have many bodies because they're all webbed together. All controlled by a central consciousness, you, that you've uploaded into this technology. So you have, you know, computer brains, computer people. so what happens when they absorb each other, combine with each other, etc. And in The Gates Infernal, we find out that that is a big no no, to say the least. Like, our main character, Orion, alright, he's one of the main characters.

Sara:

one of the main characters.

Lilly:

main character. But he says, Like, if I did that, I would be absolutely shunned by society, no one would ever like, I don't know. The consequences are not clear, but they're clearly dire for him, and he's already kind of edgy, so if he thinks it's too much, it's definitely a big deal, right?

Sara:

Yeah.

Lilly:

And then we find out why. It's because this copy paste virus basically created a, absorbed a bunch of people, you. into one big conglomeration, being the gods of dust, we find out throughout the short story. And it was just like roaming around absorbing people and, surprisingly, their loved ones who were left behind did not appreciate that.

Sara:

I mean, and I think the thing that I found interesting about it was that it wasn't a it wasn't, it wasn't like a malicious entity. Like, yeah, the people left behind weren't fans of what had happened, but it was. Not doing it out of an intent to harm, it's just, that's what happened, that's what it did.

Lilly:

there's also a really fascinating conversation around, did it kill these people? So the main character is the child of one of the women that this happened to, one of the people that this happened to. And they, are pretty clear, like, their opinion is that this virus killed my mother. But, when we meet the gods of dust, they, this, this entity of many, many different people, are like, your mom's, your mom's here, she's not dead. And the main character actually, like, gets to talk to a, like, I don't know, isolated version of her within the gods of dust. It's very cerebral. This is very, High minded sci fi, I would say.

Sara:

Like, high concept sci fi.

Lilly:

High concept, that's the word I was

Sara:

Yeah.

Lilly:

thank you. But it gets to talk about, like, you know, what is identity? What does it mean to exist? Or I should say it raises those questions without really answering them, because it is like 20 pages. It's hard to do a lot in that space. I think the, the shortness of the story, which is a really dumb way of saying short story, I have realized in retrospect,

Sara:

The short story format?

Lilly:

Yes, did lead this story. Now I've used the word story too much. It deals with themes in a much blunter way than the Shattered Gates main novels do, but that's gotta just be because of space, right? Like,

Sara:

I mean it, like you say, it's about 20 pages that's not a lot of time to delve deep into the subtleties of a theme.

Lilly:

Anything, really. The amount of space it would take to imply, what is the nature of consciousness? It's a lot more than 20 pages. So you do get, I think, a lot more of a frank conversation in a way that you don't in the main novels. It makes it feel a little bit like a thought experiment. Not in an unenjoyable way, though. It's still really rooted in our main character's emotional journey of searching for his mother. So it doesn't feel too abstract.

Sara:

no, and to be honest, I don't think that it would have worked well as a longer story. Like I think that it fits the short story format pretty well.

Lilly:

I agree completely. I think I was just struck by how different the tone of this piece was from the two full length novels that we read.

Sara:

Hmm. It,

Lilly:

Because,

Sara:

it is very different in feeling. And I think that's partly just because we're not following the same characters. And it's not, it's not to say that the main novels aren't very personal. In their characters, but their journeys and their actions have much wider ranging consequences in the greater world, whereas this is very much about one person and it's a very, like, internal journey, both literally and figuratively.

Lilly:

Yeah, I know the second half of the story takes place inside of this god's mind palace, basically. It's also in first and second person, which is really fun, and very different from the Shattergate's novels. I mean, those are pretty close third person, but it still really changes the vibe of the narration.

Sara:

Yeah, it's funny, and I don't usually do this, but if I had to assign, like, a color scheme to this short story versus the others, like, this would be very light colors, like, bright colors, and the Shattergate's books would be, like, darker colors.

Lilly:

Well, I think a lot of that is where it takes place, too, right?

Sara:

Possibly.

Lilly:

takes place

Sara:

In a desert?

Lilly:

well, yeah, in a desert, in, like, the, I would say, what you think of when you think of, Future civilization, not Star Trek in the socialist way, but like, you know, high tech civilization that we recognize Earth people could be someday. Whereas, Beyond the Shattered Gates of Heaven starts in a very alien society. A very brutal, I don't even want to say dystopian, because it's just completely, completely different from what we recognize. And it eventually meets up with this other society. That's, that's the other thing I wanted to say. Despite how different this story feels, it is perfectly consistent with everything set up in the main novels, which is just incredible. I loved how, I mean, not only are we learning about the copy paste virus and these gestalts, which are sort of just mentioned almost as boogeymen, in Gates Infernal.

Sara:

I don't know if we even really get them as boogeymen. It's, it's more like, yeah, don't do it. It's bad if you do it.

Lilly:

There's a reason.

Sara:

yeah.

Lilly:

And then this story really dives into the consequences of those events and why people were so upset. Anyway, it was good.

Sara:

Yeah. It just, it just gives, like, fleshes out a little piece of universe history. That you don't need to know or understand in order to enjoy the main books, but it's cool to know it.

Lilly:

I feel like the main book goes, Trust me, it was really fucking bad. And then this backs up that, Trust me. So not only is this short story very cerebral and very personal at the same time, it then ends on the most amazing cliffhanger of all time.

Sara:

Is it? This is, this is where I Shamefully admit that because we read this, or I read it like three weeks ago, and I've read like five books since then, I don't actually remember how it ends.

Lilly:

Okay, the main character has sought out the gods of dust to demand the return of his mother. The gods of dust says

Sara:

Yeah, if you

Lilly:

become part of me, find her, and take her back. Sure, whatever. Or take a copy of her back. And over the course of this, like, meeting his mother, who has become part of this entity, he decides that he's gonna give his mother a choice, which, like, great character agency the idea of choice is so strong in so much of the Shattered Gates storyline, and it's really satisfying to see that, like, continue to play through in this small excerpt of it. And we don't know what she chooses! It is!

Sara:

Yeah, okay. I did actually vaguely remember that.

Lilly:

Yeah, you knew that. But, oh, I don't think I've ever been so mad. about the ending of a story, but also, at the same exact time, do not tell me what happened. I don't want to know. I want to be mad.

Sara:

You're mad, but in a good way.

Lilly:

It's perfect, yes.

Sara:

I mean, the, the story just would not have the same punch if you know what happens.

Lilly:

Yeah. And that is something you can do with a short story, that if I read an entire 300 page novel and it did that, that would just, no. That would not be a fun mad.

Sara:

I don't know. I'm not sure I would, I, I think, I think you could do a 300 page story with an ending like that. And make me fun mad, but it, the bar is much higher.

Lilly:

The longer the story is, the harder it is to make that feel satisfying.

Sara:

Yes.

Lilly:

Can you imagine if we read, I don't know, throwing a number out there at complete random, no reason at all. 620 page book in reference to nothing at all whatsoever.

Sara:

Not,

Lilly:

And it ended with that kind of thing? I'd be like, fuck you.

Sara:

We should clarify that this is, this, this book we're not referencing at all has nothing to do with any of Brian Glosemeyer's books.

Lilly:

It actually does not, yes.

Sara:

Yeah, like, gen genuinely does not.

Lilly:

This is a different book that we've read recently and yeah. We're gonna get kicked off the internet about it, but that's okay.

Sara:

That episode will be coming out shortly.

Lilly:

Yeah. Anyway. Or might. I don't know when this is coming out, so.

Sara:

So it might already be out in that case.

Lilly:

But regardless, very thoughtful, very fun. And I'm kind of, well, more than kind of, I'm really excited to see what happens next in this universe. I was so happy to find out that Brian had more books planned. I had no idea that there were more coming. I think the end of book two felt like the end of the story, but in a way that left me wanting more.

Sara:

Interesting. I mean, I, I agree with you that it felt like the end of that particular story, but it also felt like there could be more story in general.

Lilly:

Well, yeah, there's this huge amazing universe where so much is happening

Sara:

No, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, I mean, specifically like

Lilly:

with Sabira.

Sara:

with Sabira and Daguerre, like there, you know, there are some book endings where you're like, okay, this is a closed story. I don't need to know what happens next. And there are some book endings where you're like, okay, clearly this is, this is. Brought to a satisfying conclusion this particular arc of the story, but I still want more. And the end of book two felt like the latter to me.

Lilly:

Yeah, I mean, I think because it wraps up, like, Sabira and Dagira sort of figure out not their place in their new worlds. but they have kind of sussed out a direction for themselves that they got to choose. And I think that was really important.

Sara:

But like, I want more of Dagira's adventures as she goes off, or this Dagira Gestalt as she goes off in the world.

Lilly:

Oh yeah, I want more. That's what I'm saying. I'm glad to find out that there's more coming. But I felt emotionally satisfied by the end of book two.

Sara:

Yes, but, and so I think, I think we're saying the same thing. It's just that, because what I'm, what I'm trying to get at, get at, what I'm trying to get at is that there are some books where you are like emotionally satisfied by the ending and you don't need more. And there are some books where you're satisfied, but you still want more. Yeah.

Lilly:

But yeah, I don't need more. I just want more. Both of those are true at the same point right now.

Sara:

I, that's, that's that's still not exactly what I'm getting at, but okay, whatever.

Lilly:

I think it would be like, I mean, I have no idea what Glowsmire is planning to do next, but to me it feels like it would be another series with these characters. You know what I'm saying?

Sara:

Yeah.

Lilly:

Like,

Sara:

I mean,

Lilly:

it's going to be a, it feels like a new story.

Sara:

I mean, like I said, I think we are saying the same thing and just not actually understanding each other.

Lilly:

Anyway. So, we have, Many, many more opinions about The Shattered Gates because, holy shit, does so much happen in these books. But we are gonna be continuing this conversation over on our Patreon where you can get bonus content including extended book conversations. We play Shoot, Screw, or Marry with the characters from these books. We have one for the characters from this series that we did actually about a year ago. I wonder if our opinions have changed. Probably not. The characters are so consistent. Like, even as they grow, they're still the same people.

Sara:

Yeah, I don't, I, I suspect that our opinions have not changed.

Lilly:

Yeah. But yeah, we're gonna talk a little bit more about The Shattered Gates Infernal. No. Beyond the Gates Infernal.

Sara:

Yes,

Lilly:

I don't know why these two book titles have just kind of merged into one in my head, and I know that's wrong, so I kind of just pick random words out of the bag, and half the time I get it right.

Sara:

No, I, I, I do the same thing with the series like for some reason the titles just, I, I can't keep them straight. I,

Lilly:

Beyond, no, Before the Shattered Gates of Heaven. See, I did it again. And then Beyond the Gates Infernal. Yes, yes, I've gotten

Sara:

And maybe a book three would be betwixt. Betwixt something.

Lilly:

I'm wondering if we're gonna get Purgatory in there and we're just gonna do all of Dante's Inferno. Anyway for more riveting conversation like this, go check out our Patreon. We'll put a link in the description.

Sara:

And for the rest of this specific conversation, I believe it's all of our supporters at the 5 tier and up get access to our exclusive episodes. So, if you want to continue listening to this in particular, you do have to support us at the 5 tier or up.

Lilly:

yes. So go do that and hear more about Sabira and Dagira and us definitely getting the names right for these books. Entirely. 100 percent of the time.