Nearly a decade ago, in 2016, Jenna was on a first date with a fellow NC State University student. Over dinner, her date shared that he’d just sold his first manuscript. Later, Jenna told her family about the date. Her brother brushed the writing news off: “Men will really say anything on their dating profiles!”
Fair enough, but this time, that suspicion wasn’t merited. Jenna’s date, Christopher Ruocchio, had indeed just sold a science fiction novel, Empire of Silence, to DAW Books. It was the first installment of what would become the Sun Eater series, the seventh and final volume of which is set to release this month. The series has since been a constant presence in the couple’s lives. As they fell in love, got married, and started a family, the series grew from a side project that sold a few dozen copies a week to the main source of the family’s income and the foundation of a new business venture, Highmatter Books.
As for Jenna’s brother? He’s now a dedicated Sun Eater reader.
The series follows Hadrian Marlowe, a young aristocrat with a penchant for melodrama and a singular relationship to time who comes of age in a far-future human society. Marlowe joins the empire’s endless war with the Cielcin, a human-eating alien race whose language has no word for “yes”—no way to agree to anything on equal footing.
Finishing Shadows upon Time, the last book of the series, came with plenty of anticipatory grief for Christopher.
“There’s a coliseum scene in the third book that I thought about every single day until I wrote it, and then it was gone,” Christopher says over a video call from his office. “And now, the whole story is gone, and there’s a whole bunch of emptiness in my head, which sounds sad, right?”
The completion of Shadows upon Time came at a chaotic enough time that it was nearly eclipsed by daily life. Christopher finished the book right after the Ruocchios’ second daughter was born, a month ahead of her due date. Jenna had also just broken her foot, and the couple was beginning to scale Highmatter Books, a small press dedicated to Sun Eater special editions and merch.
Jenna remembers getting the call that the last book in the series was finally done. She was sitting in a Bojangles parking lot, in one of her first postpartum outings. “It was like, OK, cool,” Jenna says. “It was really anticlimactic in a way I was not wanting it to be for him.”
Once things settled, she began scheming. What if they did something really big? Something Sun Eater fans had been specifically asking for?
The Sun Eater series has a tight-knit community of fans, who mostly connect online, and the Ruocchios say the community has been trying to get them to do something like the writer Brandon Sanderson’s Dragonsteel Nexus, an annual convention based on his work.
“It really is Jenna’s doing,” Christopher says, “But the idea came from my readers. They were sort of harassing us into doing a convention.”
The Ruocchios shot for a gathering somewhere in between an old-school sci-fi convention and a standard book signing, landing upon the Shadows upon Time Release Gala, slated for November 15 at the Union Hall in downtown Raleigh.
Up to 350 people will gather for entertainment from prominent “BookTubers” (YouTubers who dedicate their channels to talking about books), food and themed drinks, a book signing, and a talk from Christopher. Tickets run from the Plus One level ($140) to standard ($200) and VIP-tier tickets ($325).
The Ruocchios know of fans flying in from all over the United States. (Christopher can name the bookseller in Texas whose passionate advocacy for the series has made the bookstore the best-performing bookstore in the country for the Sun Eater books—shout-out to Patrick!) Some fans are even traveling from Portugal.
The Sun Eater gala is a fantastical affair, but it’s not entirely unprecedented.
Events like it occupy an interesting space in the science fiction world. Conventions have been enticing genre fans to travel long distances for decades, offering a sense of community to fans of historically niche media. Worldcon, one of the longest-running conventions, has been held every year since 1939 (excepting 1942–45). Christopher himself has plenty of experience hand-selling early volumes of Sun Eater from behind a convention booth.
The increasingly mainstream appeal of genre media and the proliferation of online fan communities have made events like this more popular. Today, fans of niches within niche genres—anything from dark romance to specific gaming studios—can meet like-minded people in convention centers across the country. Authors like Brandon Sanderson and Colleen Hoover have started entire conventions for their genres.
Christopher is of two minds about the popularization of fan culture.
“I think fandom fills a religion-shaped hole. There’s a real ritual element to the science fiction convention. There’s costume, and ceremony. People make pilgrimages.”
Christopher Ruocchio
“It’s gotten so big, which is great for all of the creators,” he says. People can find nearly endless offerings in whatever media they like to interact with. He offers one of his favorite genres, heavy metal music, as an example of something that has become popularized and thus more accessible: “So if there’s more heavy metal, there’s a chance that there’s more of the kind that you like. It’s true to every art form, right? So for readers, for listeners, this is the best time to be alive, to have what you love in more or less infinite supply.”
Christopher remembers being teased for reading Harry Potter, right before it became an international phenomenon. There are downsides to explosions in fan culture: The more people enter Sun Eater Discord and Reddit communities, the more the Ruocchios see the kind of nasty, depersonalized comments the internet is so perfect for facilitating. And then, of course, just because there are more books doesn’t mean they’re all worth reading—“quality level might be pitchy,” he acknowledges—but even in that, there is opportunity: “You can always keep trying. And that’s cool.”
The internet was a vital part of Sun Eater’s move from passion project to family business. Christopher, an introvert who describes himself as “spiritually Bilbo Baggins,” used to regularly take time from his job at the Wake Forest office of Baen Books, a sci-fi publisher, to attend conventions. When roughly 30 Sun Eater books began selling a week, he knew he could double that at the convention.
The real change came during the pandemic, when the pair started getting more involved in their online fandom. Christopher got on YouTube to promote his work and talk about writing. He went on as many channels as he could.
“I had the sense, if I just never said no to an interview, I would start to look bigger than I was,” Christopher says. This effort paid off in a 1,000 percent boost in sales, which pushed the first Sun Eater book back into hardcover, years after it was out of print in that format—a first for the publisher.
The Ruocchios can move fluently from discussing the writing process as a vocation and art form to talking about the books as a product and experience. It’s clearly a tension they think about a lot.
There are the metaphysical and sociological questions Christopher explores in his work: issues of consciousness and continuity, a negotiation between the great man and people’s theories of history, and engagement with the shifting reading of culture and history as described in sci-fi across time. But then there are the mechanics of making a career as a writer in the age of the internet. How do you sell a product that is, in essence, a seven-part meditation on the potential of the human condition projected over 20,000 years of materialism and technological progress? And how does an artist stay relevant and consistent enough to keep providing for their family without descending into eternal fan service?
One of those answers is to continue to cultivate a dedicated community that actually brings people together. Christopher, himself a Catholic, understands deeply the bonds formed by a shared sort of dedication, and he thinks that, while sci-fi conventions aren’t exactly new, events like this gala forge important connections in an increasingly atomized society.
“I think fandom fills a religion-shaped hole,” Christopher says. “There’s a real ritual element to the science fiction convention. There’s costume, and ceremony. People make pilgrimages. They come to this place, they buy these icons that they put up in their house the way the Romans would put up the house gods. Only, instead of Concord and Ceres, it’s Harry Potter.”
He loves to see his books create a shared culture for people who might not otherwise have anything in common.
“The president of my fan club is a punk rocker, and one of the moderators is a Dominican friar,” he says. “I think that’s really cool.”
Both the friar and the punk will be special guests at the gala, and Christopher looks forward to meeting them in person.
“What do they have to talk about? At the very least, my books,” he says. “But the answer, in a deeper sense, is a lot, actually, because I don’t believe that people really, ultimately, are that different. That’s my Christianity talking, right? And it’s fun to be able to bring people together for all this stuff.”
That’s one other reason Christopher welcomes the expansion of fan culture. Having a relationship to a beloved piece of media pushes people into doing or being something—participating in the narrative and, in that sense, growing the story itself.
“People who love science fiction things, whether it’s my work or Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings or whatever, they want to do something with it,” he says. “We live in a time of sufficient-enough abundance to be able to do that. And that’s cool. They do it for escapist reasons. They want to come and celebrate, so they’re not thinking about everything else. But I hope that it’s less that people are running from stuff than they’re running to the stories.”
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