‘Sandra is Pheonix’ by Greg Neyman

Greg Neyman discusses his novel ‘Sandra is Pheonix’

While Urban Fantasy and Speculative Fiction certainly enjoy a high overlap of readership, the thread connecting them may not be immediately obvious. To me, Urban Fantasy carries forward the traditions of folklore into the modern age, where it is concerned with the dangers posed by the untamed world that immediately borders the civilizations we craft for our safety. Speculative Fiction, meanwhile, examines the dangers that our increasing ability to tame the very forces of nature will have on our civilization.

Sandra is a biocyberpunk upgraded human that has decided to use her clandestine abilities to help those in need in the Big Tech Dystopia that we all live in right this very moment. Yes. She’s a superhero. And I offer a deep, nitty-gritty examination of how nanotech might actually work. Don’t picture tiny robots. Picture bespoke folded proteins. But as she examines the nooks and crannies of society’s less glamourous parts, she finds a hidden world of magic and creatures that should have been left behind in fairy tales. She does this in a Creature of the Week format, like X-Files, Buffy, or Doctor Who.

All my books focus on my trauma as a healer, but Sandra is Phoenix does so explicitly. Sandra is a doctor struggling with perfectionism and imposter syndrome, and all her accomplishments don’t actually make her feel she is accomplished. But the magical flip side of her struggles mirrors this. As a doctor, I was given an armamentarium of science with which to battle the forces of death and disease. But more and more, I feel my patients represent the Wyld Magicks of the Forest. Their symptoms do not match my training. My tools struggle to heal their ailments. The only thing I am certain of day to day is that down confidence lies the road to ruin. Likewise, Sandra is mostly break even on her ability as a superhero to fight the forces of the night, and almost every victory is qualified somehow. Despite all her ability, she is not the least bit prepared for the fight she signed up for.

I cap it off with the gallows humor that gets me through my work, and center the whole book around the struggle of someone who doesn’t know how to reconcile her emotions, her fallibility, and her humanity with what it is she wants to accomplish. Initially, I targeted more of the Urban Fantasy readership, hence the cover. I felt they would be less prepared for what my book is, lured in by the vampires, the witches, the ghosts, the fairies, only to find a real head-scratcher. And that’s kind of my point.

Greg Neyman is a practicing physician, computer programmer, data scientist, and now, an author, apparently. He lives with his wife, daughter, and miniature poodle in Southeastern Pennsylvania.

You can find out more about Greg Neyman on amazon.com, or follow @gregneyman_author on Instagram and Threads.

Subscribe to J.C. Gemmell’s newsletter to discover other independent authors of sci-fi, dystopian and cyberpunk fiction.

Sandra is Pheonix by Greg Neyman

Greg Neyman discusses his novel ‘Sandra is Pheonix’