Every Tuesday, get to know a bit about the stories behind the books you love, and discover your next favourite novel.

Rachel: I have been quietly freaking out about this book since I read it in manuscript form, and now it’s finally time for you to tell our readers about it. Do so!

Dale: Mæj is a high fantasy novel that one early reviewer has called “a work of very unapologetic genre fiction that’s equally unapologetic in its intelligence and dedication to doing strange, creative things with language.”

Madenhere sells mæjwerk; Taræntlere sells sex. Both young women have grown up seeing people starved and children kidnapped in their tentslum. When Madenhere learns of an imprisoned hundred-day child, her heart burns to act—but the consequences of freeing the girl will be dire. 

Meanwhile, Taræntlere’s molten fury leads her to join a secret insurrection whose implications neither woman is ready to face. Tying everything together is a power older than history which threatens to revolutionize an economy and spark a war—the power of mæj.

Rachel: Many authors depict the idea of matriarchy as something inherently softer and gentler than a patriarchy. You went a very different route. Why?

Dale: First of all, I find it perfectly believable that a given matriarchy could be softer and gentler than a given patriarchy. But I want to emphasise “given”: specific, particular. One problem we face when we imagine alternate worlds is that we, or our readers, can fall into the trap of essentialism: “Because women are all this way, a woman-led society would always work out like this.”

We wouldn’t say the same thing about patriarchy. For example, in the twentieth century, which was dominated politically by men, we saw the coexistence of liberal democracy, fascism, totalitarianism, democratic socialism, Islamic republicanism… as well as kibbutzes, hippie communes, you name it… There were all sorts of ways people were organising human affairs politically. Men were the bosses of the big systems, but those systems didn’t all function the same, and some were arguably softer and gentler than others. There’s no reason to suppose women-led systems would not also differ in this way.

This is the source of my resistance to the notion that, you know, “if we just put women in charge, there’d be no more wars,” et cetera. That sort of thinking is insultingly reductive. But it would be equally simplistic merely to swap the pronouns and portray matriarchy as a perfect mirror of patriarchy. So I wanted to think, not about how “female nature” would dictate political systems, but about how this particular matriarchy would have evolved to operate. Because the world in Mæj is not a world without exploitation.

What matriarchy and patriarchy have in common is the –archy, the rule of some over others. The particular matriarchy I wrote about preserves such hierarchy, such power differentials—and human beings are rarely at our best when given arbitrary power over others. If one group is up, another group will be down, and those with power will display a range of attitudes towards those beneath them, from sympathy and solicitude at one end to supercilious callousness at the other. Sadly, the crueler sort of people tend to be more adroit at manipulating and benefiting from power.

Rachel: Maej features extreme acts of linguistic acrobatics, with language denoting class and caste in a skillful way. How did you design your various dialects?

Dale: Oh, we could get nerdy with this one… I’ll try to rein myself in.

Before I wrote this novel, for years I nursed the notion of “my fantasy novel”, a book I would someday write. I love the language of Shakespeare and decided beforehand that, when I wrote my fantasy novel, I was going to throw in everything I liked, so “thee” and “thou” had to go in. 

The Hwoamish language is a mashup of Tudor English with various other dialects, including traces of characteristics of Japanese (which I happen to speak) such as sentence-ending interjectory particles and rhyming four-word aphorisms which are meant as homages to four-character idiomatic compounds found in Chinese and Japanese. Also, I live in Malaysia and hear so-called “Manglish” on a daily basis, so bits and pieces of that went in as well.

As for using language to denote characters’ classes and backgrounds, I think life in Malaysia has greatly influenced me. In addition to English, people here speak Malay, Canto, Tamil, Hokkien, Hakka, Mandarin… all to varying degrees, and I don’t think there’s a single language common to everybody in the nation. Characteristics from one language will ooze into another, but there is still a mélange of linguistic difference which links people to a multiplicity of backgrounds.

I think of things like this, and I also think of an Irish guy I once knew, from Belfast; every time he met another person from Belfast, he’d listen to them speak for a moment, then declare (generally with great accuracy) which neighbourhood they had grown up in. This fascinated me as a U.S.-born person because I speak a dialect of English that spans time zones, lacking such geographical specificity. So I am intensely interested in focusing in on such things. If we maintain an awareness of what our voices and words say about our biographies, we can craft dialogue for individual characters which hints at such histories and differences.

Other made-up languages in Mæj are mostly translated into contemporary English, but when I wanted to show a few lines of untranslated Ennish, for example, I’d take an English sentence, reorder the words to Japanese grammatical order, then have fun with spelling and diacritics.

Yes, “fun with spelling and diacritics”. Freak flag: flying.

Rachel: As the cover designer, I was of course struck by the visuals—the art, architecture, and fashion of your invented world. Did you have a strong sense of the aesthetics when you started writing, or did that come later?

Dale: It came gradually as I drafted the manuscript. Before starting a new scene, I would do “pre-production” work, including lots of image searches for clothing, buildings, artwork, and so forth. I’d also sketch things out on paper, such as the exterior of West Hospitium or the floor plan of Nighpetal Manse. I stink at drawing, but having a visual helped me discover how I wanted to paint things in words. 

I’m also an inveterate word collector, and for Mæj I compiled a list of more than 2,500 words and phrases I just had to use. Many of these were wonderfully evocative of a visual, which helped me fill out my imagery.

Rachel: Maej is highly literary. Is it a challenge to balance the expectations of epic fantasy as a genre with your own proclivities towards literary fiction?

Dale: To be honest, I am rather naïve about genre expectations. When I began working on Mæj, I had no idea how publishing worked. I figured, “You write the kind of book you’d love to read, and then somehow (vague waving of hands) it gets published.” I remained blithely uncognisant of the idea that publishers and ultimately readers would measure the book against genre expectations.

So any such “balance” of expectations and proclivities happened by accident; I wanted magic spells and talking gryphons, and I also wanted Shakespearean dialogue and jawbreaker vocabulary words… and everything else I personally like also got tossed in. Maybe “mishmash” is a better word than “balance” here.

Rachel: This brick of a novel is such a tremendous feat. What are you working on next?

Dale: Shorter works! After wrapping up the bulk of Mæj, which occupied me for (I cringe to say it) about ten years, I sat down and wrote a literary novella titled Gyre in just a couple of months. Now I’m working on a science fiction novella (with bathyscaphes, sea monsters, mind control tech, etc.) which, again, above all else, I hope to keep brief.

Spending a long time slow-cooking a massive novel was, in its way, highly rewarding, but now I’m enjoying the change to a quicker pace of writing. Gyre is about a woman who is born a second time with some knowledge intact from her prior lifetime, and it is currently seeking a publisher. If the Fates smile, in the fulness of time it may see the light of day.

Rachel: Where can readers find you, Maej, and your other work?

Dale: Mæj will be published on 21 October 2024 by tRaum Books. You can preorder the book on Amazon (ebook and paperback) or Bookshop.

The publisher and I are also keen to find people who are willing to receive a free advance review copy (ARC) in exchange for posting an honest review; anybody interested can sign up for that here. I send an infrequent newsletter called The Seldom which you can sign up for on my website. My favourite social media platform is called “email” but I also lurk on Bluesky and Goodreads.