#395 A Conversation with Jeremy Szal

March 27, 2026·1 hr 5 min·5 clips

A sci-fi author reveals how an alien drug that makes users addicted to violence became the core of his bestselling trilogy.

1. Fantology Podcast episode 395 features Jeremy Szal, Sydney-based author of The Common Saga, discussing his writing process, influences, and the third book Wolfskin, released on the day of recording. 2. Jeremy Szal is a science fiction and fantasy author based in Sydney, Australia, with approximately 40 published short stories translated into 17 languages and collected in Broken Stars, in addition to The Common Saga trilogy. 3. The episode's core purpose is to introduce listeners unfamiliar with Szal's work to The Common Saga and explore the themes, influences, and craft decisions behind it. 4. The Common Saga's premise: the DNA of an extinct alien race is harvested and engineered into a military drug called storm tech, which makes soldiers addicted to violence and aggression; Szal describes it as 'Mass Effect meets Red Rising, with alien drugs and found families.' 5. Szal traces the premise to a thought experiment — 'what's the most messed up but fun way to tell the idea of integrating with alien technology?' — with the drug angle emerging as the answer, followed by working out the societal consequences at personal, political, and world-building levels. 6. The series opens after a major galactic war rather than during it, focusing on what Szal calls 'the fallout' — who gets left behind, who picks up the pieces, and what those pieces look like when reassembled — with the war re-igniting in later books. 7. Szal cites Red Rising, Mass Effect, Altered Carbon, Star Wars' prequel trilogy, and Christopher Ruocchio's Sun Eater series as key influences, particularly praising Sun Eater's 'ultra-advanced society with mysticism and mythology' as a model for far-future feudalism. 8. Host Stephen notes that Stormblood felt cyberpunk despite lacking the aesthetic, which Szal attributes to a noir-ish gritty voice and the melting-pot multicultural settings — characters from mixed alien and human backgrounds sharing neon-lit bars and speaking multiple Earth languages. 9. Szal draws explicitly on his own multicultural Australian background and mixed family heritage for the language and identity threads in Stormblood, including one character who refuses to speak Japanese because of an abusive father — a detail based on relatives who won't speak Arabic after difficult experiences. 10. Szal argues that space opera readers sit much closer to the fantasy end of a sci-fi/fantasy genre slider, making science fantasy — stories with sci-fi backdrops told in fantasy's language — 'a very undermined market' that editors continue to resist. 11. Dune is cited as the archetypal science fantasy, praised for using fantastical terms ('thinking machines' instead of AI) and political structures that read as medieval fantasy despite the space setting, and for mandating knife fights over guns. 12. Szal studied film and applies a cinematic philosophy to prose — thinking in terms of blocking, framing, and external obstacles rather than internal monologue — specifically to write visceral, chaotic battle sequences. 13. The Game of Thrones season six Battle of the Bastards was the explicit visual template for Stormblood's climactic battle flashback, with Szal aiming for readers to feel as if 'you can taste death between your teeth.' 14. Szal contrasts his tight first-person perspective with Joe Abercrombie's technique of head-hopping across characters killed in sequence, noting he writes exclusively in first person or tight third to keep readers locked inside the protagonist's experience. 15. The addiction element creates what Szal describes as a core identity fracture for protagonist Vakov: storm tech makes him violent, but it may also be revealing a darkness that was always present, making the question 'is it nature or nurture?' unanswerable and 'both answers terrifying.' 16. Vakov's soldier found-family — the brothers he made during the war — function as the only psychological anchor preventing him from fully surrendering to the storm tech, and Szal says their relationship drives the story more than any plot mechanism. 17. A scene Szal does not fully describe, where one of the soldier brothers commits an atrocity, is called out by hosts as a moment that immediately escalated the stakes by showing what Vakov risks becoming. 18. The interview has a casual, enthusiastic tone with Stephen and two co-hosts; Szal is relaxed and self-deprecating, noting he sometimes has to rewrite whole chapters because Vakov 'just won't do what I wanted.' 19. Best suited for readers of dark sci-fi and grimdark fantasy who want to discover a new series and hear its author explain the themes firsthand. 20. Listeners who have not read fantasy or grimdark sci-fi and have no interest in the genre will find little outside the reading experience on offer.

As heard by us

A sharp, genre-aware interview about the cost of making violence addictive.

Fantology's interview with Jeremy Szal keeps its focus on Stormblood and the trilogy's central idea: alien technology joined with a drug that makes violence addictive, and the damage that idea leaves behind for soldiers, society, and wartime ethics.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want an author interview about a violent, addictive sci-fi idea and what it does to a whole society.

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