Author Focus – SA Tholin

SA Tholin is the award-winning Swedish author of The Primaterre science-fiction series. I read the first book, Iron Truth, earlier this year and absolutely loved it (you can find my review for Page Chewing here), so I was delighted when Sofie agreed to do a Q&A for Author Focus so we could delve further into her stories and creative process.

Tim – Hi Sofie and welcome to Author Focus. Can you start us off by telling our readers a bit about you and what led you to becoming an author.

Sofie – Hi Tim, thanks so much for inviting me! I'm Sofie, I live in a village in the woods of southern Sweden with my boyfriend, our toddler and cat, and I am somehow the writer of nine science fiction novels.

I say somehow because my plan was always to write fantasy. My parents set me down that path by naming me after a Lord of the Rings character which led me to read the books when I was five, and I continued to devour anything remotely fantasy-ish within reach. When I was 18, I won a national SFF short story competition (Fantastiknovelltävlingen), and that made me think that, hey, maybe I can do this?

I wrote a few more short stories, but as I knew I wanted to write in English to reach a larger audience, I moved to Cambridge to get a Certificate of Proficiency in English. Then I got sidetracked for a few more years, studying Japanese and creative writing, until moving back home to Sweden. Time to finally write my big fantasy novel – or so I thought!

I wanted to write about dragons, elves and magical princesses, yet here I am, researching multistage amplifiers, zwitterionic polymer coatings and armour-piercing discarding sabots, and I have honestly no idea how that happened! The first time I let someone beta read Iron Truth, they were just as shocked, haha – their first comment was 'how did you write this?'. It's a mystery!

Iron Truth was the inaugural winner of the Self-Publish Science Fiction Competition, established by the author Hugh Howey. What was that experience like for you?

It meant everything to me. The whole year felt electric and emotionally overwhelming - I cried when I found out Iron Truth had made the finals!

The day the winner was to be announced, I stayed off social media entirely, playing game after game of Talisman to take my mind off things. Then, mid-game, I went to make tea, and while I was in the kitchen my boyfriend took a sneaky peek to see if the results were in. He queued up We Are the Champions by Queen, and hit play the second I walked back into the room. It was one of the best moments of my life – and I'll always cherish the wonderful ray gun trophy!

The SPSFC also opened my eyes to how much good self-published SF there is. Now my TBR pile is easily 75% self-published books, all thanks to the judges, reviewers and bloggers shining a light on so many amazing writers – AKM Beach, Steve Hugh Westenra, Iseult Murphy, Helyna L. Clove, and Yuval Kordov to mention but a few!

What I found interesting about Iron Truth was it draws upon a number of different genres and their conventions. So we have hard military sci-fi and the book is jam-packed with action scenes, but we also have cosmic horror and a full-on romance, all in the same story. Did you always intend the novel to contain all of these elements or was this a tale which grew in the telling?

Iron Truth was only supposed to be a novella, a quick little story to write for fun before getting stuck into editing a fantasy novel (as yet unpublished). Over two million words of Primaterre books later, I think it's safe to say it grew in the telling!

I'll have the general structure of the story in my head before I start writing, but I don't outline anything beyond the broadest strokes. I much prefer to treat a story as a mystery I'm trying to solve, word by word, page by page – and all said and done, I want the reader to have the same experience. I want us to go on a big adventure together! Who knows what'll happen, who we'll meet, which genres will blend, and where the characters will want to go?

That's how Iron Truth ended up the way it is. The characters demanded romance, the plot drove the action, and the cosmic horror crept in, as cosmic horror tends to do.

Were there any particular inspirations or influences which helped you come up with the world, concepts and characters we meet in The Primaterre series?

Despite being a voracious reader, the spark of inspiration for Iron Truth actually came to me while playing Fallout 4. There was a particular moment, in which a character has a realisation that makes them question their identity and everything they believe in, that made me want to write a story with that kind of personal, earth-shattering epiphany as a central theme. There's a scene in Iron Truth, Cassimer on his knees in the mud, facing the horrors of everything that's been done to him, and everything he has done. It happens pretty deep into the book, but it was the first scene I envisioned, and it was around that moment that the rest of the story grew.

When it comes to tone and vibe, I see a lot of 2000AD influence in my writing. Judge Dredd and Strontium Dog in particular, but also Helltrekkers, a fairly bleak and brutal comic that etched itself into my subconscious when I read it as a kid. As for authors, Stephen King is an obvious huge influence, along with Michael Moorcock, Dan Simmons, and Diana Wynne Jones.

Your website says you still have at least one more novel to come to complete The Primaterre series. How’s that fifth novel coming along? Is that going to be the end of the story, or will the series continue after that?

It's a bit of an odd one, as the four existing books in the Primaterre series complete the story arc. I consider the fifth a bonus book – one more adventure with Scathach Banneret Company and associates! – but it will also wrap up a mystery I've been teasing throughout the series. The sort of thing that, in the scheme of things, might seem like an irrelevant detail, there only as flavour, but is in fact a cosmic disaster in the making...

I know what happens in the first three chapters, down to lines of dialogue, and I have extensive notes, but it'll be some time before I actually start writing it, unfortunately. There's a joke in there that I came up with while writing Summer Empress, and it's incredibly frustrating to have a joke on the shelf for years, haha. I want to tell it!

Your later books have moved away from the main series and have been standalones. Why the change and does your approach differ when working on those?

Though epic in scope, the main series has a narrow focus - the majority of the characters are military citizens of the Primaterre, yet their actions and choices have galactic repercussions. With the Primaterre Tales series, I wanted to explore what it's like to be a civilian, foreigner or enemy combatant in the same universe.

About a century before the main series begins, an apocalyptic war ended with the sudden appearance of demons that possessed and slaughtered millions. Everyone in the universe knows it happened, but opinions are divided as to why, what the demons are, and how to stop them. What makes the standalones really interesting to me is that readers of Iron Truth/Lonely Castles already know the truth, but in the standalones, most of the characters don't, and never will.

Instead of hiding mysteries from the reader, I get to bring them in on the secret. Together we get to watch in horror, pity and amusement as people who know nothing do their best (or in some cases, their worst) to navigate a universe they cannot understand, where forces beyond their comprehension are making moves that affect their lives in ways both subtle and catastrophic.

In the main series, it was all about uncovering mysteries. In the standalones, I get to write people making terrible decisions based on false beliefs, tragedies that could've been avoided if the characters had all the facts, and my personal favourite, the moments when the characters skate agonisingly close to the truth.

The standalones also function as the pieces of a puzzle – each Primaterre Tales book contains at least one hint at what's coming up in the fifth book of the main series. None will be required reading to follow the plot, but all, I hope, will add layers to it!

Thanks so much for taking the time to answer my questions and for your interesting answers! Is there anything else you would like to tell us before we wrap up this interview?

 I'm currently revising the first draft of my next Primaterre Tales novel, in which Detective Grace Telluride investigates a murder in an asylum seekers camp on Phobos. It's one of the most challenging environments I've ever written, from the unstable nature of Phobos itself to the fraught dynamics in the camp. It'll hopefully be out in 2026 – expect plenty of low-gravity mayhem!

Thanks so much for having me, Tim, and for your kind review of Iron Truth! And to all the readers who've supported the Primaterre series over the years, I'm forever grateful. I can't wait to share what's coming next!

If you want to know more, my books can be found on my website: https://satholin.com/books/

I also have a Patreon where I post deleted scenes, occasional updates, and even an entire free novel: https://www.patreon.com/tholin

And I can be found on X as @tholin, and on BlueSky as @sofietholin.bsky.