Book Buzz: Brighter Than Scale, Swifter Than Flame by Neon Yang
I don’t know it there’s an inspiration per se other than “I like dragons, and I like lady knights, I want to write a book about those things.” And so I did. “Brighter Than Scale” tells the story of Yeva, a dragon hunter with special abilities who was absorbed into empire against her will as a child and, as an adult, is sent as an ambassador to a nation that worships dragons as part of her emperor’s territorial aggressions. There she meets the girl-king Sookhee, the charismatic leader of the nation. But their growing relationship is threatened when Yeva uncovers secrets that will challenge the way she sees the world, and herself. The book may appear to be a queer love story, and it is indeed a queer love story, but at its core I think it’s about identity, it’s about finding your place and finding yourself in a world which constantly wants to erase you.
― Neon Yang, Interview, OutSFL
What booksellers are saying about Brighter Than Scale, Swifter Than Flame
- Yang combines near-expert worldbuilding with cleverly constructed prose, earning themself a place along fantasy greats. Balancing commentary on imperialism with moments of queer joy, Brighter than Scale, Swifter than Flame is a brilliant exploration of what it means to belong, to a person, to a place, and most importantly, to yourself.
― Sydney Mason, Epilogue Books Chocolate Brews in Chapel Hill, North Carolina | BUY
- Yang weaves a beautiful tale about duty, love, magic, the mask you choose to show the world, and finding home. I absolutely love the world Yang creates and the love story at the heart of this novella. Knights, kings, emperors and the quest to find a dragon- you’ll fly through it!
― Tayler Engelhardt, Bookmarks in Winston-Salem, North Carolina | BUY
- It’s incredible how much richness Neon Yang was able to pack into such a small number of pages. I thoroughly enjoyed this updated take on the classic narrative of the heroic knight riding in to save the damsel in distress: Yang flips the story on its head and gives readers an all-too-brief but beautiful story about coming to accept all parts of ourselves and the cultures we come from
― Bailey Ross, Cavalier House Books in Denham Springs, Louisiana | BUY
About Neon Yang
Neon Yang (they/them) is the author of four other novellas (The Red Threads of Fortune, The Black Tides of Heaven, The Descent of Monsters, and The Ascent to Godhood) and one novel (The Genesis of Misery). Born and raised in Singapore, they currently live in the UK where they spend their days avoiding productivity by playing video games. Find them on social media @itsneonyang.
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I like my stories to be immersive. I am a visual person when writing and reading. So to me, it’s all part of the characterization: the way that they wear clothes, what the clothes look like, what they look like. I also want it to be a lived-in world. So let’s talk about getting dirty. Let’s talk about taking baths. Let’s think about chapped lips. When I watch particularly fantasy content, I almost look for these things because it is a layer of grittiness that I like, a texture in a story, that I feel is real. The Knight and the Moth was really fun, like gossamer versus armor. You can look into themes of these things too and apply them to the story, or you can decide to read them very literally.
I guess a lot of the fantasy I read as a kid was very much in the shadow of Tolkien, and in Lord of the Rings there is an objective right and wrong. You either give in to Sauron or you fight him, and the text leaves no doubt which is good and which evil. Not that I ever lost interest in Gandalf and Aragorn but as the years went on I started to find Saruman and Boromir more interesting. People who fall from grace, or rise to it. Characters in flux, in turmoil, weighing greater good against personal good, with mixed motives, with uncertain outcomes. People who surprise the reader. In our world, everyone thinks they’re in the right. Battles aren’t of good against evil, but one man’s good against another’s.
Food has always been an obsession of mine, but I had never written it really into my fiction, aside from, occasionally describing what somebody was eating, describing a flavor somebody remembered. But this was the first time where, I think years of reading cookbooks, of watching cooking shows, of watching my parents cook, of cooking myself, and experiencing different flavors and different cuisines, and being really tuned into that…I think this was when all of that sort of manifested. This was my first try at writing something that felt like eating. And there were even moments where I would try to eat the foods that I was describing to get the mouth feel right…I completely invented recipes for for several of the dishes in Aftertaste that wind up being these sort of spiritual connections that can bring a spirit back. And in some cases, I would attempt to make the flavors, but in most cases, I just knew in my head what it would taste like from from just experiencing cooking and experiencing flavors. I would use that sort of intuition, also paired with what that character needed at the time. So I think one of the things in Aftertaste that happens is that the food is never just the food. The food is really evocative of a particular flavor of memory. So is it they’re sweet? Is it? Is it something that really disturbs the spirit that’s trying to come back? Is it something warm? Is it something that they’re excited to taste again? Is it a recollection that buoys them, or is it something that crushes them?
