The Flirting with the Zodiac series is my longest series. It’s over halfway finished now, with seven out of a projected thirteen books in the series published. Given that, I thought it was high time to talk a bit more about the series, its genesis, and some of the influences that inform the books.
Some of the influences are much more obvious than others, while others might seem, well, a little bit obscure. Since each book is a standalone, I’ve been able to draw on a much wider variety of sources and influences to inform characters, alien species, and settings, than I might have otherwise.
With all that in mind, let’s take a look at the ingredients that went into creating Flirting with the Zodiac.
Why Did I Write the Flirting with the Zodiac Series?
Flirting with the Zodiac came to be after a discussion with a close author friend. I was lamenting some of the challenges of author life. She encouraged me to simply write what I wanted.
I embarked on that process by writing the first manuscript, Main Squeeze. I originally envisioned the series as being solely about snake-shifter aliens. By the time I’d finished the second manuscript, The Bull by His Horns, I knew that wasn’t going to be the case.
Hook, Line & Sinker was actually the third manuscript that I prepared. This is where you can see where I fully embraced the idea of a twelve-book (later thirteen-book) series. Each alien species would be connected with a different constellation in the Western zodiac.
Hook, Line & Sinker represents Pisces. The aliens are the Pisceans, who hail from a watery planet orbiting one of the stars in the constellation Pisces.
Hook, Line & Sinker is actually one of the darker books in the series. That may not seem true at first glance. Prior to the publication of Two Scorpions in a Bottle, readers didn’t really have an opportunity to see just how dark the political background is. With that book out now, I can say that Hook, Line & Sinker is really the story of genocide survivors. Ty and his father are, effectually, refugees from Piscea.
Ty is largely unaware of that political reality, or, at the very least, he doesn’t seem to talk about it. His father doesn’t talk about it either. But both of them clearly experience some form of PTSD; Ty self-medicates. Both of them indicate some degree of loneliness and isolation, having been cut off from their culture and their people. There don’t seem to be a lot of Pisceans on New Martia—and there is a reason for that.
The End Point Masks the Larger Narrative
As I continued to write more books in the series, the political background became more overt. When I moved from having one alien species be the focus of the series to having twelve different species, I pondered what that would look like. Was this just a narrative about humans exploring space and discovering new species?
As I thought more about that, I realized there was a deeper narrative to be told. Yes, space exploration was part of it, but, historically, Western culture has sought to “take over” new peoples. I imagined it would be no different once we were talking about space exploration. As humanity encountered new peoples and planets, it was unlikely that colonialism and imperialism wouldn’t be involved.
Of course, not all peoples would be colonized. That was where the idea for the intergalactic war came in. Humanity is exploring and expanding their reach. Yet they’re also quickly sucked into the broader politics of other space-faring peoples. Humanity must decide with whom to align.
The denizens of Harriot, the crab-like aliens known as the Harriods, are the leaders of the Coalition. The Alliance forms the other axis, encompassing aliens from Scorpius, Rasalas, and Corvus. The Coalition has accused the Alliance powers, particularly the scorpiates, of dominating other peoples. The crabs suggest their war is justified because they’re going to liberate the peoples the Alliance are oppressing.
One of the things I wanted to explore was how colonial powers vilify other cultures to justify the takeover. The crabs might be stand-ins for the European colonial powers of the 1700s and 1800s. They might equally be a stand-in for the US in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The point is that they paint themselves as being liberators, when they really have their own less-than-noble goals in mind.
Dialogue between Books: Everyone Is a Villain and a Hero
The biggest challenge was presenting the Alliance books: Two Scorpions in a Bottle, Lions Will Tame Leopards, and The Raven Before the Dove. All three of these books focus on characters who, in other books, would be cast as “the villains.”
The conceit here is that the books are talking back to each other. In doing so, they ask the reader to think about what reality is. It’s easy to believe US rhetoric that Venezuela’s leadership has done horrible things. Yet looking at the larger picture shows us something more complex. The Venezuelan government refused to privatize the world’s largest oil reserves, denying US oil companies unfettered access without recompense. The US cut off aid in retaliation. Is the US really “punishing” a government that’s harming its own people? Or is the government spinning this to justify measures that culminated in a coup? Ousting socialist governments in Latin America is practically an American pastime.
Oil is the biggest driver of disputes in the last seventy-five years or so, although other resources certainly play a role. Land, and the resources that come with it, drive a lot of human conflict. In the Zodiac series, this is scaled up to become planet-wide conflict. No longer are we dealing with states or territories or even countries. We’re dealing with the fate of entire planets.
Developing the Different Alien Species
Another thing I wanted to explore in the Flirting with the Zodiac series was different cultures. Obviously, that’s fairly easy when I have twelve different alien species. But specifically, I wanted to explore some of the cultural diversity we find here on Earth.
With that in mind, the snake-shifter aliens who appear in Main Squeeze and The Bull by His Horns are modeled on several cultural groups who have traditionally inhabited regions of the Amazon forest in South America. These peoples have different approaches to things like family, which are in direct opposition to Western understandings. The Scorpiates represent something more like Ancient Egypt. (The crows were meant to represent Russia, particularly their role in World War I, but I think that one got away on me.)
This tendency is expanded upon in other books. Lions Will Tame Leopards and The Raven Before the Dove all feature polyamory, while Scorpions looks at cultural attitudes toward sex and pleasure. Riding the Dragon features yet another look at different family structures.
Diversity Means More than the Cultural
As much as I’m drawing on cultural diversity, I’m also including biological diversity as well. Each of the alien species is correlated with its zodiac animal (or, in the case of those that don’t have an associated animal, another nearby constellation). Lions obviously represents the sign Leo, and the aliens form prides. Libra is represented by the dragons (and the associated constellation Draco), which are parasitical in how they reproduce. Pisces is the fish, and Ty is a very specific kind of fish: a seahorse or pipefish.
The biological influences the sociocultural here. Environment influences how species evolve, and it also influences sociocultural development as well. People who live in a desert will be equipped to deal with heat and sandstorms. People who live on a tundra are more likely prepared for cold weather and blizzards. These factors would influence traditional garb, housing, modes of transport, and even storytelling and myth, among other things.
The Zodiac series allows a larger canvas to explore how these thing intermingle. How does the environment of a given planet influence both the biology and the sociocultural development of the people who inhabit it?
Where Did All This Come From?
I’ve worked as a textbook editor for most of my career. That has privileged me to access lots of tomes meant for higher education classrooms. The subject matter of those books has ranged from politics to history to anthropology, sociology, psychology, and even biology at times.
In short: I’ve read a lot, and a lot of what I’ve read has informed the Zodiac series. I’ve edited primary source readers about everything from the Viking Age to CIA operations in mid-twentieth century Guatemala. I’ve read enthographies of peoples in the Amazon, Ireland, and around the world. I’m also lucky enough to have worked on biology books that delve into the complicated subject of biological sex. And I’ve read, with horror, documents from the archives of the Government of Canada about how Indigenous Peoples were subjected to what amounts to genocide.
A lot of this stuff is harrowing, but it has asked me to think deeply about the stories we’re told. Many scholars have laid bare the workings of the world for me, the machinations of history and governments and people, as well as alternate systems of thought and belief.
The Core Message of the Flirting with the Zodiac Series
That’s what I want to explore in the Zodiac books. Effectively, I want to look at how reality is crafted by narrative, how one’s reality shifts and changes as one is exposed to new peoples, new places, and new ideas.
I think that’s the biggest influence in Flirting with the Zodiac. I can talk about others—like music or pop culture or what have you—but that is definitely front and center in a series that has become more political the longer it has gone on.
At the end, the underlying theme is love. No matter how different or strange another person or a culture might seem, at the end of the day, it is still possible to love each other. We only need to seek to understand each other.
Unfortunately, that is where humanity often falls down. We get caught up in difference, focusing on our own needs, rather than the needs of the greater good. If we could stop being scared of what’s different or unknown, then perhaps we might one day be able to rise above this tendency.
For now, though, that’s something we can only dream about.
