Silver Bark Books correspondent interview with Caldon Mull: May 2026
Introduction: What it is ‘busting the cache’, you may ask? Have you ever wondered why your favorite author keeps getting asked what their favorite breakfast food is, or when they last had a shower, or something so mundane that it is meaningless? Where are the details about their book? What drives them to write their characters like they do, or what is behind some of the nuance in their works, why ‘like that’ and not something else? That is what we mean by ‘busting the cache’ and that’s what we cornered Caldon Mull with in this tranche of articles.
SBB: So you’ve been writing for awhile now so there is quite a lot to cover in the time you’ve given us. Why did you do the Smithereens like that? You get the good and the bad, the old and the new and readers can decide? Was that the deal with the format?
CM: I guess? Most of the time when collections and anthologies get scheduled for reviews the professional reviewer will usually read the three shortest make some comment and move onto their next paycheck. They have become very niggly at me in the past, but they can’t disprove it, I know they know that I know. It is very seldom that I see any useful reviews of a themed anthology, or why individual shorts are weak or strong or why the volume is useful. I don’t think that there is any engagement with it beyond what the reviewer is feeding to their own audience, Not an objective, meta-level view of any of their review material. Most often, their review enhances their proximity to the leading edge of literature and culture, not the artist whose work they are commenting on.
SBB: You’re taking a stab at reviewers?
CM: Not at all, but I think that modern focus on the number of reviews a work gets as the primary determinant of an algorythm better make sure that the reviews are fit-for-purpose if that’s the case. Heaven forbid that a review would be a collection of ‘likes’ that don’t actually engage why critically a body of work is important. What I’m saying is that it is easy to get lazy and misrepresent why you would think a work is important or unimportant, spending ten minutes flipping through some authors months or years of work and then punking out with a three-star review and moving on from an author contribution you’ve picked out from a list that you might think you feel like at the time… everyone else just sinks into the abyss… But anyway, I guess with the Smithereens what I actually wanted was to channel the focus on the Volume itself. Sure, there is going to be weak stories in the collection, but then there is also going to be a novella – and that takes a different set of focus.
SBB: So the very construction of the volume is trying to do something different? A challenge to the reception of that type of work? Disrupt the formula of bad habits? Bold, don’t you think?
CM: Yes. When I started to think about reprint collections, the extant publishing wisdom was “never, never do this thing.” Absolutely unthinkable. But I thought if nobody is doing it, then why not? It’s immediately different, immediately distinctive and forces a new way to look at how to read them. So, long story later, they’ve done well for me, relative to other collections volumes and I see the format has gained some popularity in the time since my volumes went out. A smaller number of stories, different sizes and pace within the volume makes a lot of difference in how you approach the reading experience. Chances are that you are going to have to read all four shorts and the novella in order to complete the task.
It would become very apparent in the review if it was just processed as they normally are, grist for the mill. I mean, there were practical concerns as well with regard book size, pricing and word counts, re-editing timelines and other practical considerations on collation, but they were less important than to present this format experiment as it was eventually delivered.
SBB: Do you think it worked? I see some reviews consider them a developmental time-capsule, tracking the development of author themes and changing political environments in retrospect.
CM: I’m not sure, frankly. The volumes have sold relatively well as book-books. They have sold a magnitude above other collections and anthologies from what I can see on the aggregator boards that I follow. They get a lot of attention from American University and State Libraries as well, as I have discovered such as PennState Uni and Douglas County Public, I mean all relatively. I also seemed to have side-stepped the very thing I was hoping to avoid in ‘passenger reviews’ as I’ve mentioned earlier and I guess that’s already a win.
Also, and we have argued about this a lot, is that ‘The Smithereens’ get to stay associated only with the Caldon Mull author brand. Sure you have tidied them up for me for the impression, but those things are time capsules for my career. I’m still game for other collection, re-print and theme projects with you but ‘The Smithereens’ are no-touchy because they are so personal. The Volumes are my career retrospective, my bookmark more than anything else.
SBB: Sandglass: The Collection is doing quite well for us at Silver Bark Books, but it’s not an ordinary short story collection either.
CM: Um, no. Adding in the essays and backstories gave it a, um, meta-data feeling. I suppose that covering such a long expanse of time does feel like sand running through a glass. Hopefully not empty [laughs] but it is more than, and perhaps less than the Smithereens, in the sense that it is closer to convention and with fewer exceptions to that. I mean it fits with current commercial tastes better than the more exotic style of the Smithereens. I mean, I still cringe reading some of the earlier works and realizing how far I have grown as a novelist since then. I think that might be the point, though. If I smooth and polish and re-edit some of them to today’s standards and tastes then I am erasing decades of painfully obvious lessons and stupid mistakes that I needed to make at that time. Sandglass: The Collection is accessible to a general audience without the vulnerability I feel with each Smithereens launch.
SBB: Is there another ‘Smithereens’ volume in the works?
CM: Uh, probably. It will be called ‘Grabens’ and I have all the material for it already, but I’m bogged down at the moment with other projects and will need to get to it. The ‘reprint-only’ condition is self-imposed and I might have to rethink on that a bit, and I still have 80’s and 90’s shorts available for inclusion. I’ve been busy, so it doesn’t look like I’m needing to look at the Trunk Story tipster just yet. I mean the Smithereens have always been a ‘then-and-now’ lens for me and apparently also for people who follow this sort of process. Some of them are indeed very rough and raw as I’ve mentioned and I still feel very exposed publishing them after so long in the dark. I never envisaged more than five volumes, so I’ll keep one in the bag for later.
SBB: Okay, let’s flip past that and head for the Adata Saga. Let’s dig around here for a bit.
CM: Well, you said you were going to do this. Should I be worried?
SBB: Hope not, asking the questions nobody else would ask? Cutting through sound-bytes and canned responses?
CM: Go on, then. Rawdog away.
SBB: You said you sat with Xylana Bells for the longest time, and everything proved particularly difficult for you.
CM: Yeah, I mean I’m happy with the book as it stands… but… [pause] It didn’t fit, from at first draft.
SBB: What do you mean?
CM: Not what I wanted to do with it from design. I did most of the work on the piece in the mid-90’s already and had been so busy with all the other projects and the science fiction and the dream-stuff that by the time it came to hammer it out, I had changed and my position had changed. I looked up after many years and everything about coming of age, what masculinity meant and what earned status would look like, had changed in the public domain. Apparently there is something called the ‘manosphere’ now, and it knocked all of my positioning for a six.
SBB: Oh? How so?
CM: Well, I’ve always had to be careful of my target audience when I’m writing my Ubuntu pieces, but this was a different experience for me. I mean, I’m writing from a rural African perspective with regards to sexuality and masculinity and it’s all I know. All my characters at the deepest level are not Western-centered adults so all of the modern expressions of western culture-war with regards masculinity threw a spanner into the works.
SBB: What is this ‘ubuntu’?
CM: It’s a word that means, sort of, ‘I am because of what we all are’. It has a few different expressions all along the same plane. It’s an african word and doesn’t translate efficiently. Actually, that’s helpful for my previous point. My perspective had not shifted in line with the western monoculture perspective preferences between say, 1995 and the current day.
SBB: Okay, I guess. That seems to fit a lot of your collectivist writing styles. Are you saying the essence of The Adata Saga had shifted between then and now?
CM: Yes, I suppose that’s it. The theme and the motif for the Xylana Commonwealth stayed steady throughout the stages, I guess, but I wanted to tell the story in a very specific way. This reflected back on me because I’m not as young as when I drafted the Saga. My concept of injustice has matured and my perception of evil and morality has broadened. I’ve had, say, thirty years to think about it. The subversion of what mature, respected adults should be in a healthy society everywhere has been, I dunno, tarnished in what regard a masculine-coded coming-of-age would look like. I suppose you could say that the parameters of what masculinity and sexual equality in a healthy society would look like has moved over the years while I was busy with other stuff. I have always been a proponent for Gender Equality, and all my work should show this equality without me having to register this on record with an appropriate State watchdog Bureau, or something suchlike.
SBB: Okay? You have a habit of layering your work, by now a reputation for doing so. Playing with perceptions, undermining expectations… but now the end-point has changed?
CM: Yes, by now. What I wanted to examine in the world that I had designed had somehow shifted under my feet. I had to re-think the parameters of what a healthy, successful adult would look like in this world, and I didn’t like where my initial draft was pointing to.
SBB: So what does the world of the Xylana Commonwealth look like? What are the parameters that you set out for it?
CM: Instability and Stability? So in broad strokes, the world is an unstable one and civilization is pounded out of existence every so often by a rain of pure magic. The ‘High Magic’ phase. I mean, catastrophic stuff… writing becomes magical, shopping lists become fireballs, lizards become dragons… The only stability comes from the places around an ‘elemental nexus’ of one type or another which consistently shield and shape their surrounds at their own intensity. Then the magic subsides, and the people get to do their thing again; this is the ‘Low Magic’ phase. Just to shake things up, there are ‘Wild Magic’ swings for certain places and certain times, but of short duration.
I wanted to set the story towards the end of a long ‘Low Magic’ phase. This is what I wanted to hone in on. I mean, the Commonwealth is one adaptation based on the stabilizing power of their nexuses, and the lineages and clans and organizations are another. I suppose the Commonwealth is an allegory for this…[pause] this, late post-capitalist, post-industrialist, global-monoculture Society of today.
The Xylana Commonwealth societies are all adaptations in one regard or another to manage this worlds’ instability, but as we’ve seen in modern-day real life and as I’ve examined in other books… something happens to organizations after they get established. They become obsessed with their own continuation and less with the reason that they exist in the first place, which is; to better manage the instability that caused them to form initially. Something then changes in the relationship between these organizations and that of the critics -or apostates- within the organization. Realistically these must always exist and should always be prized by these organizations as a lodestone for the health and the purpose of these organizations.
In modern times whistle-blowers, critics and apostates are only prized because they are often perfect scapegoats, not valued as reformers or contributors at all. It’s fascinating to me what and how it happens and I wanted to dig deep with the Xylana Books. I like to think of young people as the whistle-blowers of any society. If something is wrong with a society, such as opportunities being scarce, cost of living inequalities, employment barriers or even fertility decisions – settling and raising children; then the whole society should be talking on this more generally. The Xylana Commonwealth was this allegory for me. The sword hanging over everybody’s head usually does not change perceptions and behaviors, it’s simply another ‘new normal’.
SBB: The world is quite intricate, it’s not quite like many other Fantasy Series. What’s under the hood?
CM: Thank you, I agree. It’s set after about a thousand years of a persistent ‘Low Magic’ phase, and all the organizations you’ll encounter are convinced that they have a recipe for success, that bad things are simply apocryphal stuff. I’ve taken a hybrid soft magic system throughout because everyone has magic, but all magic is personal and bounded and is part of the environment; not part of the spectacle of the characters or their story. It’s all personal charisma – influence, reputation, if you like – that boils the fabric of the politics and the magical societies.
I’ve based this magic fount around William Reich’s concept of orgone, a hypothetical universal life energy. It is with this orgone attunement that your aura and your willpower, and your station in society gets to drive personal success. Everyone gets this, and the relationship between the orgone and your attunement is reflected as an individual, in your relationships with other attuned individuals.
In this sense, any individual cedes some authority to others, accepts some authority over others, and whose adult lives are give-and-take for equal measure. I haven’t stated it as such, but this World is completely egalitarian by design and the distinctions happens only by lineage, wealth or attunement.
Your magical attunement to one of Nine Elements provides some utility with that element, but a lot of that is environmental fabric. The fact that you are elementally attuned means that you could get compelled, or mesmerized or dominated by another elementally attuned individual, that’s just the way it is in the world.
Also, technology does exist, and so I thought that I’d place the Xylana Commonwealth equivalents in the Age of Revolutions, I mean real-world 1780AD to about 1830AD. The Adata are Bellweathers for this time and in this world. I track them through the eyes of Monash and his siblings because I think its very important for any society to monitor the options and provide opportunities for it’s future generations, even if it’s only fictional fantastika.
SBB: You’ve said that often enough.
CM: Yes, I believe it to be true. I’ll keep saying it. Large, successful organizations often seek to control harbingers and symptoms as if they were root causes, as if these are systemic risk to only themselves. The admission that the organization is helpless in the face of instability like this, that when the inevitable occurs the organization is existentially irrelevant. The Commonwealth isn’t ‘evil’ personified, neither are the Adata, they are adaptations to instability. But evil does exists, and allegorically it nests within those bodies that are convinced the only remedy is to destroy instability and reinforce their version of stability. I suppose the High Council and their agents, the Hawk Knights fit that description, even if – as the dominant, imperial superpower they wouldn’t see it in that way, that they are evil. I mean, this particular allegory should be obvious enough.
SBB: The whole ‘absolute power corrupts’ argument? Or the one where ‘good men do nothing’?
CM: Perhaps more nuanced than that. The quickest way to check out of any power relationship is to reject it outright. Power requires legitimacy and is exercised through compromise. If these elements are not present, it becomes coercion. The act of coercion becomes evil, not the power to contemplate using coercion if any compromise fails. So the nuance perhaps sits in that Power is a magnet for the corrupt. In a world where everyone is attuned to elements, and this attunement permits compulsion and dominance of other attuned individuals, then I could examine this nuance. Where ‘presence’ and ‘charisma’ become a verb that cuts through ordinary life, and to see where that would lead. Particularly where what appear to be options grind down – if you follow them through to a logical conclusion.
SBB: Then the analogy would be modern youth and modern society, and the allegory would be modern young men in modern society?
CM: Um, yes. My rethink lead me to some dark places, and then thankfully back again. I had to make some adjustments in tone and then I could continue the story. I mean the Epic Fantasy genre at it’s core is supposed to be entertaining and escapist. If it resonates on other levels, then fine and well, but I’ve not built this world for anything else.
SBB: I touched a nerve, I guess.
CM: Dman right.
SBB: Can we talk about Storyville, a bit?
CM: Perhaps another time. It’s a tricky subject for me and our time is running out. There is a lot to unpack with Storyville.
SBB: Fair enough, and thank you for this chat.
CM: You’re welcome.
The End