Out Now: Rajah Versus Conquistador — A Novel
Acknowledgments
Find all the links at rvcbook.com
I’m marketing the novel as the real-life game of thrones. I think it fulfills the promise of a fun political chess game between a psychopathic southeast asian strongman and a right wing white supremacist catholic monarchist. But what’s harder to market to a mainstream audience is that this is also my exploration of the weaponization of the scapegoat mechanism by kings and priests, the encounter between this ancient dragon and Christ, and manhood and violence.
This novel was initially intended to be a short story, a kind of parable which I will then explain through essays—my “native tongue.” I’ll eventually do this. For now, let me give a preview of these layers by sharing the acknowledgement section of the book.
Acknowledgments
I need to thank the people, books, and tech that helped shape this story.
First of all, thanks to Mitya Topacio-Aplaon for being my writing coach and atubang – my interlocutor – in the fourteen months it took to write this novel. Thanks as well to S.Z. Underhill for the alpha reader feedback.
When I first read Pigafetta’s chronicle around a decade ago, I felt that he was missing something. His depiction of Humabon felt like a surface-reading of a complex character. After a few years, it suddenly clicked. When I imagined Humabon to be a psychopathic Filipino politician, all the rajah’s moves finally made sense. The book An Anarchy of Families gave me the lens to see the figure of the Big Man / Orang Besar / Cacique. Thanks to my one-time boss JJ Calero for lending me his copy of this book. God rest his soul.
After that revelation, the idea for this story lay dormant in my head for years. My conversations with the Davao-based writers John Bengan and Nathan Go convinced me that this story should be a novel and that I should write it.
The social world of this novel owes a lot to René Girard's work. I discovered Girard through Luke Burgis's book Wanting. Thanks as well to Geoff Schullenberger for running the course that helped me dive into Girard's ideas and explore how they could underpin this story.
The psychologies (and psychopathies) of the characters are based on Venkatesh Rao’s triangle in The Gervais Principle, which I developed into “The Three Epistemologies” – harmony, power, and truth. See my Triangulations series in Explorations.ph for more on this.
The origin story of the binukot and the baylan is based on my analysis of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson’s film Trance and Dance in Bali through the lens of Girard’s scapegoat mechanism. I thank Albert Santos for mentioning this film in class and to Eric Hoel for featuring it in his newsletter. Check out my article in Issue No. 32 of the Contagion Journal (Michigan State University Press) if you’re interested in this analysis.
This novel’s take on the diwata was an epistemology of power reinterpretation of my neo-animist manifesto, Psychofauna Studies (published in the Seeds of Science blog).
The 16th-century Visayan society depicted in the novel is based mostly on Laura Junker's Raiding, Trading, and Feasting, which I discovered through the PODKAS Podcast. I also relied on William Henry Scott's Barangay and Looking for the Prehispanic Filipino. On top of these, Marshall Sahlins and David Graeber's On Kings helped make sense of the role of ritual sacrifice in premodern kingships. I thank Cleo Kearns for recommending this book.
The most comprehensive study of ritual human sacrifice in the Philippines, Narciso Tan's Púgot, was the source of the idea of multiple kalag within each person. Thanks to June Prill-Brett for recommending this book. I used (or misused) the imagery of the psychoanalytic framework Internal Family Systems (IFS) in the depiction of the kalag. The little I know about IFS came from the Tim Ferriss Show and pandemic-era TPOT.
Magellan’s limpieza de sangre arc is thanks to the book Genealogical Fictions by María Elena Martínez, which was recommended by Kristie Flannery. The "Apollo Versus the Crucified" resolution emerged from engaging with David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite and Tom Holland's Dominion. The unpublished PhD dissertation Miguel Lopez de Legazpi: Writings and the colonization of the Philippines by Edna-Anne Valdepenas was the source of the conquistador's connection to the Roman Empire. The non-fictional parts of Magellan's background were mostly based on Laurence Bergreen's Over the Edge of the World.
Working on this novel for more than a year was an expensive luxury I could not have afforded had my co-founder Val Bonite not stepped up to run most of the operations of Advenient Corp. It would have been much more expensive without the help of Claude by Anthropic. Based on how long it took me to write the fully handcrafted chapters, it would have taken me four to five years to complete this novel without this LLM. Thanks, Val and Claude.
Lastly, thanks to the muses – the diwatas of this tale – who orchestrated the countless serendipities that made this book a reality, and who for years had sent fragments of scenes and sentences from wherever stories come.
—Kahlil Corazo Davao City April 2025