Interview with J.M. Beraldo, Author of Veil of Truth

What's the story behind the story? What inspired you to write this book?

"Why don’t you write a book about that?"

I was working on my first video game as a game designer, and I came up with the story of a psychic bounty hunter who is chasing the crew from the TV series Firefly. Well, not exactly them, but you get the idea. It had hints of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in it.

None of it fit the video game we were working on, so it got discarded. One of the artists, though, asked me, kind of teasing, kind of serious: "Why don’t you write a book about that?"

That was 2003, and that book ended up published in Brazil in 2005. It also got me my first full-time job in the video game industry and was the first of a dozen novels I have published since.

The story did change. The focus is now on the crew, not the bounty hunter, but it still has a lot of the same references.

Veil of Truth is finally coming out in English now, over 20 years after it started both my game design and novelist careers at the same time.

If you had to pick theme songs for the main characters of your book, what would they be?

The first song that came to my mind was The Heat Is On by Glenn Frey, though that might just be because I watched a lot of Eddie Murphy movies when I was a kid. The lyrics do match, though, as the bounty hunter closes in on the crew, and each individual character has their own secrets and goals. Another one would be Take Me Home, Country Roads by John Denver, as the crew moves farther and farther away from Earth, and the nostalgic longing we Brazilians call 'saudade' sets in.

What's your favorite genre to read? Is it the same as your favorite genre to write?

I love science fiction and fantasy both as a reader and as a writer. I enjoy the sense of wonder, exploring new worlds, new cultures, and new points of view. I’m also a history and culture nerd, so I often read a lot of books about ancient history, especially those focused on how cultures were formed and why. I think all of that feeds my brain with ideas for creating my own worlds.

What books are on your TBR pile right now?

Two science fiction books written by Brazilians: Repetição ("Repetition") by Alexey Dodsworth, told from the point of view of an AI responsible for replicating people who passed away for corporate clients, and A Besta ("The Beast") by Felipe Castilho, about a cloned saber-toothed tiger accidentally released in a corporate cyberpunk city. Both writers have written short stories set in the Veil of Truth universe, coming out this year in English in the anthology Tales from Veiled Space.

What scene in your book was your favorite to write?

As a kid, I was fascinated by the Mos Eisley cantina in the first Star Wars. All those strange creatures in the background, the hidden stories in what you could see and hear around the main characters, really triggered my imagination. Early in Veil of Truth, the characters land on a trade station at the edge of civilized space, looking for the next job. There they see how plural the concept of life is in this universe. Much like in the cantina, there are many stories hidden all around.

Do you have any quirky writing habits? (lucky mugs, cats on laps, etc.)

It takes me a while to get "in the zone" to write. Which is silly, considering I was writing for a living for most of the last 20 years. I will often listen to random YouTube videos until they become white noise in the background, while I’m trying to reread my notes or a previously written scene. At some point, I’ll start typing furiously, and it may be 30 minutes in when I realize there is annoying YouTube babbling distracting me. I’ll turn it off, wondering who the moron who put that on.

Do you have a motto, quote or philosophy you live by?

There are two I learned in college. The first, by philosopher and theologian Leonardo Boff, translates into English more or less like this: Every point of view is the view from a point. It doesn’t translate perfectly, as there is some wordplay there in Portuguese, but basically, it’s the fact that the same thing, the same idea, can have a completely different interpretation depending on who is looking at it, their background, their current situation, and their physical position. The other one is from the father of history, the Greek Herodotus, who believed learning about other peoples like the Egyptians and Persians helped him learn more about what it was to be Greek.

If you could choose one thing for readers to remember after reading your book, what would it be?

Humankind is plural. The world is huge and full of wonderful things and ideas. Sometimes changing your point of view is all you need to gain a new perspective.