Blog Tour and Book Excerpt for "Nero and Sporus"

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1 day ago
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Book Title: Nero and Sporus

Series: Nero and Sporus

Author: S.P. Somtow

Publication Date: May 30, 2025

Publisher: Diplodocus Press

Pages: 750

Genre: Historical Fiction / Historical Biographical Fiction / LGBTQ Interest

Any Triggers: Sexuality of various kinds, violence, slavery.

Nero and Sporus

by S.P. Somtow

Blurb:

Finally available in one volume! The decadence of Imperial Rome comes to life in S.P. Somtow's Literary Titan Award-winning novel about one of ancient history's wildest characters.

The historian Suetonius tells us that the Emperor Nero emasculated and married his slave Sporus, the spitting image of murdered Empress Poppaea. But history has more tidbits about Sporus, who went from "puer delicatus" to Empress to one Emperor and concubine to another, and ended up being sentenced to play the Earth-Goddess in the arena.

Buy Link:

Universal Buy Link: https://books2read.com/u/ba90Qx

This title is available to read on #KindleUnlimited.

Author Bio:

Once referred to by the International Herald Tribune as 'the most well-known expatriate Thai in the world,' Somtow Sucharitkul is no longer an expatriate, since he has returned to Thailand after five decades of wandering the world. He is best known as an award-winning novelist and a composer of operas.

Born in Bangkok, Somtow grew up in Europe and was educated at Eton and Cambridge. His first career was in music and in the 1970s, his first return to Asia, he acquired a reputation as a revolutionary composer, the first to combine Thai and Western instruments in radical new sonorities. Conditions in the arts in the region at the time proved so traumatic for the young composer that he suffered a major burnout, emigrated to the United States, and reinvented himself as a novelist.

His earliest novels were in the science fiction field and he soon won the John W. Campbell for Best New Writer as well as being nominated for and winning numerous other awards in the field. But science fiction was not able to contain him and he began to cross into other genres. In his 1984 novel Vampire Junction, he injected a new literary inventiveness into the horror genre, in the words of Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, 'skillfully combining the styles of Stephen King, William Burroughs, and the author of the Revelation to John.' Vampire Junction was voted one of the forty all-time greatest horror books by the Horror Writers' Association, joining established classics like Frankenstein and Dracula. He has also published children's books, a historical novel, and about a hundred works of short fiction.

In the 1990s Somtow became increasingly identified as a uniquely Asian writer with novels such as the semi-autobiographical Jasmine Nights and a series of stories noted for a peculiarly Asian brand of magic realism, such as Dragon's Fin Soup, which is currently being made into a film directed by Takashi Miike. He recently won the World Fantasy Award, the highest accolade given in the world of fantastic literature, for his novella The Bird Catcher. His seventy-plus books have sold about two million copies world-wide. He has been nominated for or won over forty awards in the fields of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.

After becoming a Buddhist monk for a period in 2001, Somtow decided to refocus his attention on the country of his birth, founding Bangkok's first international opera company and returning to music, where he again reinvented himself, this time as a neo-Asian neo-Romantic composer. The Norwegian government commissioned his song cycle Songs Before Dawn for the 100th Anniversary of the Nobel Peace Prize, and he composed at the request of the government of Thailand his Requiem: In Memoriam 9/11 which was dedicated to the victims of the 9/11 tragedy.

According to London's Opera magazine, 'in just five years, Somtow has made Bangkok into the operatic hub of Southeast Asia.' His operas on Thai themes, Madana and Mae Naak, have been well received by international critics.

Somtow has recently been awarded the 2017 Europa Cultural Achievement Award for his work in bridging eastern and western cultures. In 2020 he returned to science fiction after a twenty-year absence with "Homeworld of the Heart", a fifth novel in the Inquestor series.Currently he has just finished Nero and Sporus, a massive historical novel set in Imperial Rome.

To support S.P. Somtow's work, visit his patreon account at patreon.com/spsomtow. His website is at www.somtow.com.

Author Links:

Website: https://www.somtow.com/

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/spsomtow

Twitter / X: https://x.com/somtow

Facebook: http://facebook.com/somtow

Instagram: http://instagram.com/somtow

Book Bub: https://www.bookbub.com/profile/s-p-somtow

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B000APBJXC/

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/81037.S_P_Somtow

Book Excerpt:

I suppose we were anxious to see who the surprise competitor would be, but no one was as surprised as Himself. For the man who walked over to the center of the scenic was no less a figure than Lucius Domitius Paris himself. And Paris, too, was Niobe. Another Niobe. This Niobe was wearing a simple cloak, as though awakened from sleep to the horror that had been wreaked on her children.

The Emperor sputtered, “How could he, how dare he!”

There was no chorus. There was no ensemble of kitharas and flutes. Only a single four-stringed lyre. Paris waved for the music to begin. We were all waiting for the sound of his voice, celebrated by critics and music lovers throughout the empire. But he did not sing. The lyre sounded … just one note, again and again.

Nero whispered, “I brought him here to help train me, not to undermine me!”

Then Paris spoke. Again, he did not sing. After a brief introductory strophe and antistrophe, Paris stopped his recitation, and allowed the lyre-players to play, just a repetitive sequence of notes, a slow ostinato that seemed meaningless enough but grew in force and obsessive power until the sound produced was overwhelming.

And Paris mimed the tale of Niobe’s grief. This was his surprise! He had not entered the singing competition at all — he was not going to sing a note. This was his revenge against the poetaster Emperor’s mediocrity.

Paris was alone on stage but as he played all the roles — the gods, the tormented princess, the innocent boys and girls — you could see all fourteen children riddled with arrows as the twin gods, sun and moon, hunted them down and shot them. You could hear their screams, the shock of the palace servants, the swoosh of celestial darts as they found their marks, the rending of flesh, the spurt of blood and the gush of tears. All without Paris making a single sound.

I looked around. People were in tears.

Nero muttered, “I begged him to teach me mime. Begged him! He refused. He refused me! And I now I know — he always intended to make a fool of me!”

Nero rose from his seat and began to storm away. I got up to follow, but he sternly waved at me to sit back down. “You must represent Rome,” he said. He left, and a dozen Praetorians went with him.

Paris had still not sung. What I witnessed next was extraordinary. I saw the spirit of Niobe slowly dissolve, like wine poured into sand, and the actor emerge. It happened slowly. It was as if Niobe had possessed his body and soul, and now was gradually dissociating herself from him. And what remained was an actor, an empty vessel.

There was a stunned silence.

The applause came like a storm at sea.

Lucius Domitius Paris, I thought, is a dead man.

Literary Titan Author Interview:

Delicatus follows a young boy from ancient Rome who is enslaved by pirates and becomes a key player in Poppeae’s plot to become the Divine Empress. Where did the idea for this novel come from?

I first encountered Sporus at Eton, studying Alexander Pope with the remarkable teacher Michael Meredith, a guru to generations of literary and stage personalities. Pope’s satire on an 18th century local aristocrat notorious for sexual ambiguity led me to be fascinated by this figure, who was well known enough in 18th century England for a poet to allude to him in a satire, yet mostly just a footnote in history books about ancient Rome today if he appears at all.

I would encounter this character from time to time (there’s an illusion, for instance, in the TV series “Succession”) but there are only scraps in the historical record. But what scraps they were! Not just the relatively well-known bit about Sporus getting castrated by the emperor Nero and made his wife … but what happened to Sporus in the year 69 AD when four different emperors held the throne and all had a different relationship with Sporus … from a second wedding to an order to execute him in the arena … and all before Sporus turned twenty. But it took me another fifty years before thinking of it as a novel.

What kind of research did you do for this novel to ensure you captured the essence of the story’s theme?

I’ve always been interested in ancient history and I’ve written both serious and satirical novels in that setting, so I have been doing research for decades. It’s a way of taking revenge on my bullying Latin teacher, as well. I’ve read most of the primary sources (some in the original) but more important, I spent a lot of time daydreaming about what that world, with its radically alien attitudes, was really like … because, despite its weirdness, it is a world populated by real people who speak to us today. One of the things that is hardest to wrap one’s mind around is that absolutely no one thought that there was anything wrong with slavery, and that because slaves could not be distinguished by race, there was a kind of continuum where you rise to a position of great power and still technically be a slave. Big things like that influence the world-view, but also little things, like human urine being collected to use in laundries. This is a very well studied period so there is a lot of consensus about what this world was like. But there are still gaps in the consensus and this is where imagination comes in.

What is one pivotal moment in the story that you think best defines Sporus?

When Sporus receives his freedom from Petronius, and realizes that in many ways nothing has changed. In a sense this is a central theme of the story. Even the Emperor, we’ll see in the second book, suffers from a kind of enslavement.

To be honest, I didn’t originally conceive of this as a trilogy but as a big fat book. But I’m getting on in years and I want to make sure the whole story comes out. In terms of the trilogy, the real pivotal moment probably happens in the middle of Book Two …

Can you tell us what the second book will be about and when it will be available for fans to purchase?

The second book will be on sale Dec 1 and is already available for pre-order (note: it has since been released). The second book deals with Sporus actually becoming Empress and takes us to the humiliating end of his reign … and the third book deals with Sporus’s life in the Year of Four Emperors … perhaps the most eventful time of all.

Imperatrix: The Empress Who Was Once a Slave follows a young slave thrust into the decadence and danger of Nero’s court as he strives to survive and find his place in a world ruled by an insane emperor. What inspired you to choose Nero’s Rome as the backdrop for Imperatrix?

Growing up in England in the 1960s, I was one of the last generation to receive a “classical education” in which subjects like Latin were compulsory. So, the history of imperial Rome was almost as familiar to me as real life — and, compared to real life in a British boarding school, almost as weird, too. I was surrounded by fictional depictions of Nero’s Rome, in literature and film, yet they generally are as much about the mores and culture of the time they were written in as about Rome. I wanted to try to achieve the real alienness of this pagan culture while at the same time showing that these people are clearly recognizable to us in the modern world.

One important difference is the entire societal treatment of sexuality and sexual morality which was in many ways more permissive than today, but also more restrictive in other ways. Relationships today are seen as two-way; in Roman times “maleness” was about doing, and “femaleness” was about being done to. Everything has to be interpreted in that light. “Of course” one could do anything to a slave, no matter what their gender or age — they were owned. Yet a modern, two-way gay relationship where the partners were equal might have been seen as eccentric, somehow un-Roman.

When this one pillar of modern moral discourse — the idea of relationships being equal, going both ways — is altered, every little thing in society is seen through a different lens. That was the challenge — not to allow a modern sensibility to be interjected into characters’ attitudes — while at the same time showing characters that modern people share common humanity with.

Sporus is a complex and captivating character. Can you share the process of developing his personality and how you balanced his vulnerability and resilience throughout the story?

So many bad things happened to Sporus that he could not have survived without a great deal of native wit and real intelligence. To survive in Nero’s court was tough even for people who had been raised and bred for it. To develop his character, I imagined him talking to me, letting me share his innermost, often contradictory thoughts. It’s the core of innocence that people around Sporus love — the thing they themselves do not possess. But that innocence is constantly besieged by the realities of his world. I think that making this a first-person narrative makes you constantly strive to understand the realities of that world. It’s an imaginative exercise in chanelling if you will.

How did you approach crafting Nero’s character, and what were the challenges in depicting his divine madness and capricious nature?

Of course, we know a lot more about Nero than we do about Sporus. This means not only that it’s easier to create a character people would recognize as Nero, but also harder to bring out qualities that might be concealed behind the very well-known persona. Nero was not raised to be an Emperor, so on some level, he must have been able to understand how ordinary people felt. The evil madman image is to some extent anti-Julio-Claudian propaganda — followed by Christian propaganda. He was, almost to the end, rather popular, but the mob was fickle.

Can you give us any insights into what we can expect in the next installment of this enthralling trilogy?

In a way, the big events are all in the third part, a large part of which is set during a single year in which four emperors came to the throne, and Sporus’s fortunes ping pong rapidly. Nymphidius “took” Sporus for a while but his bid to become emperor did not work out. Otho, like Nero, married Sporus (and of course both were Poppaea’s ex-husbands.). The first part of Book III, the Grecian tour, is also an immense spectacle. So I hope the third volume will be suitably climactic.

I didn’t mean to do this in three volumes. It’s just that at my age, I worry about not finishing big fat books, so breaking them up is a way that least parts of them reach the audience. At about 180,000 – 200,000 words the three volumes together are a pretty fat work, but they are continuous, so it may also be necessary to do an omnibus edition.

Damnatio Memoriae is the final, emotionally raw, and beautifully written chapter of the Nero and Sporus saga. How do you feel now that you have completed Sporus’s story, and were you able to achieve everything you wanted with the characters in the novel?

This is really one long novel, but now that I’ve reached an advanced age, I always worry about being able to finish things so I decide to do it as a trilogy so that even if I were to pass away, that would still be some parts of the book out as separate books. Because of this, I’ve lived with the characters for a very long time. One thing though is that we do know how the story ends, and we’ve always known it because it’s one of the few things that the historical record actually tells us. One problem with releasing the story in smaller chunks has been people getting the last chunk and complaining bitterly about the protagonist’s fate. Unfortunately, it’s one of the few things I couldn’t change without violating the whole idea of a historical novel.

What goals did you set for yourself as a writer in this book?

My largest aim was to truly inhabit the world of the first century and completely eschew any kind of moral or philosophical biases I might have as an inhabitant of our modern era. This is very difficult because so many things that were taken for granted are now shocking, and something that taken for granted today would’ve shocked the Romans. For example, the idea of people actually being equal would have been astonishing. Sex and violence, so much a cause of societal uproar today, were not only not that profound, they were even mostly entertainment.

One reader complained bitterly that I didn’t use archaic language. But the Romans didn’t know they were ancient! I had to strike a balance between colloquialism and exoticism. Everyone doing what I do has to find their own happy medium. I hope that that which is exotic or horrific about the Roman world comes across most successfully when it is treated as completely commonplace.

What experience in your life has had the most significant impact on your writing?

Bringing up a child who was completely comfortable as either gender and had no qualms about switching whenever he felt like it. This book is actually dedicated to him. I use the word him because the language I usually speak to him in is Thai, a language in which most pronouns are gender-neutral. People who grow up in this culture simply don’t suffer any agony about pronouns.

What is the next book that you are working on, and when can your fans expect it to be out?

I’m returning to science fiction and fantasy at the moment with a new post-holocaust trilogy set among wolves. I’m also doing a sixth novel in a series that I’ve been working on for over 40 years. It was very popular in the 80s and I’m reviving it. It’s one of those vast Galactic Empire kind of things.