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The Big Idea: Isabella Maldonado

Posted on June 2, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      1 Comment

In her Big Idea for her new novel A Killer’s Game, author Isabella Maldonado touches on popular party events, adrenaline, and your long-lost ancestor, Grog. How do they all fit together? Like a puzzle.

ISABELLA MALDONADO:

The big idea behind A Killer’s Game was the explosion in popularity of escape rooms, which provide the dopamine hit of a puzzle combined with the adrenaline rush of a ticking clock. All over the world, people are lining up to put their wits to the test. Do they have what it takes to crack codes and solve puzzles under the threat of imminent doom—or at least, the imminent detonation of a paint bomb?

So, what’s the appeal? In researching the answer, I discovered that it comes down to neuroscience. Human beings are hard wired to seek solutions to problems, and our brains reward us when we succeed. Throughout our evolution, an unforgiving environment weeded out those who lacked curiosity or could not think creatively under pressure.

Take Grog, our prehistoric ancestor, always on the hunt for sustenance. If Grog saw a line of tracks with three splayed impressions in front and one behind, he might recall that birds made those kinds of marks in the ground. Following the trail might score him a nutritious and tasty egg. Grog, however, would be wise to note the massive pawprints also leading in the direction of the coveted egg. Grog had to use experience, but also extrapolation, and a form of deductive reasoning we would refer to today as pattern recognition and predictive analysis.

Today, most of our decisions don’t have life-or-death consequences, but some do. As a rookie police officer, I was trained to understand that my frontal cortex (aka: executive function) could be short-circuited during a crisis. One of the instructors at the academy said, “Imagine me asking you to solve a long division problem.” He paused a beat, then added, “now imagine that I’m firing a gun at you while you’re working through that equation.” We all got the message. Mathematics would take a backseat while we scrambled to get our asses out of the kill zone.

Remembering this lesson created an entirely new challenge when I started to plot the story. As a law enforcement professional who wore a gun and badge for over two decades, I write strong female protagonists. But what kind of character could believably handle an escape room where the riddles and traps were deadly, and her competitors were all trained killers? Who would be capable of solving complex problems under fire?

A US Army Ranger.

More research revealed that the 75^th Ranger Regiment out of Ft. Benning, Georgia is home to some of the most elite, highly trained combat personnel in the world. To become a Ranger, candidates must complete Basic Combat Training (BCT) and Advanced Individual Training (AIT) before being screened for the Ranger Assessment and Selection Process (RASP). Those who are selected to serve in the 75th Ranger Regiment earn the distinction of “scrolled” Rangers. The first female scrolled Ranger joined the Regiment in 2017, and women have left their mark since then, including in combat tours beginning in 2019.

After reading about these very special women, I knew one of their number had to be represented in my escape room story. After all, why should Jack Reacher, Jason Bourne, and Rambo get all the action? But, whether male or female, I thought it was high time to combine a classic action hero with an escape room thriller.

This is how FBI Special Agent Daniela “Dani” Vega was born. I gave her a background as a former military codebreaker who followed her father’s footsteps to earn a position in the Ranger Regiment. That way, she could credibly solve puzzles and crack codes while under extreme pressure.

I’ve never written anything like A Killer’s Game, which some have described as Squid Games meets Criminal Minds, and I didn’t realize how daunting it would be. Part of the challenge was coming up with a credible way for a federal agent to go missing while on an undercover operation. Another part was devising the riddles, codes, clues, and traps she and her fellow captives had to deal with. Lastly, creating a motive for the person behind such a fiendish plot kept me up at night. The book involved a tremendous amount of research and effort but was also a lot of fun. I can only hope readers get that dopamine-adrenaline combo hit from trying to solve puzzles on the edge of their seats.

A Killer’s Game: Amazon|Chapters Indigo|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author’s Socials: Website|Twitter|Instagram

The Big Idea: Beth Cato

Posted on June 1, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      5 Comments

Be warned: In A Thousand Recipes for Revenge, author Beth Cato can get… well, a little cheesy. But, perhaps, not exactly in the way you might expect.

BETH CATO:

I suppose other people might start work on a novel set in a musketeer-era fantasy world because they want the opportunity to write swashbuckling adventures, rapier duels, dramatic horse rides, and political intrigue. All of those things are awesome and get page space in my book, too, but in my case, A Thousand Recipes for Revenge emerged from a desire to write about magical cheese.

That’s right, magical cheese. If you know me at all, you know this is on-brand for me. If you’re coming across me for the first time: Hi, I’m Beth Cato, and I love cheese. This has been a lifelong thing for me, but in June 2015 I decided to go full special-interest mode. I started a document appropriately called the Cheese Log, wherein I record any and all new cheeses I try. Wherever I travel, I’m all about seeking out new, local cheeses and imports I can’t find in the wastelands of Arizona. My trip to the United Kingdom in 2019 was planned around a day trip into the Yorkshire Dales to visit the Wensleydale Creamery. I’ve had airport screeners pull aside my bag because the contents (i.e. aged hard cheeses good for travel without a need for refrigeration) seem “suspicious.”

I’ve worked cheese into my writing before. My Clockwork Dagger novels featured cheese-loving gremlins. Magazines have published my short stories such as “How to Creatively Host Cheese Parties During and After the Apocalypse” and “Prognostiqueso” (find those in Hexagon Magazine and Daily Science Fiction, respectively). Building a book from the concept of magical cheese, however, meant doing deep world-building. That’s my kind of thing. I love delving through stacks of research books and gleaning details as I create intricate settings. For me, going all-in on cheese and other good food meant I could only turn to one place on Earth for inspiration: France.

There’s an oft-quoted line from Charles de Gaulle that reads, “How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?” (His number was actually way off–according to DK’s book French Cheeses, there are more like 500 today. Pre-industrialization, there were far more varieties to be found there and elsewhere.) My dilemma was, how can I build an original magical system from the likes of Brie and Langres? First of all, I decided to create a secondary world that roughly correlates to France in terms of places, seasons, and resources, but has its own unique history. The latter is also what drew me to the 1600s and 1700s–there was so much to use for inspiration, from court intrigues to musketeers to food science! I also realized the book couldn’t just be about cheese. There was such a wealth of provisions (some of it questionable by modern tastes) to explore.  

Which took me to the next vital question: why would cheese, and other foods, be magical?

Because the Gods said so, of course. I created five food-based Gods to oversee my world. Hester, God of Fire. Selland, God of Salt. Lait, God of Milk and New Growth. Melissa, God of Honey and All Things Sweet. Gyst, the God of Unknowns such as mold, bacteria, and fermentation. Because of the Gods, magic exists through particular foods that then bestow powers upon people.

As I already find cheese to be pretty magical, it only feels right for it to empower people. It also makes sense that Gods would be directly involved with blessing people through enchanted foodstuffs… though the meddling of deities could also be a very bad thing, as my characters soon realize. And as I also sometimes realize when I find that Gyst has perhaps been a touch aggressive in his visits to my own cheese drawer.

A Thousand Recipes for Revenge is out now from 47North. Be warned — this book might cause you to crave cheese and other delicious things!

A Thousand Recipes for Revenge: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Audible

Author socials: Personal site|Instagram|Twitter

The Big Idea: Yukimi Ogawa

Posted on May 26, 2023    Posted by Athena Scalzi      3 Comments

It’s a special talent to write in a language that you’ve learned along the way. In this Big Idea for author Yukimi Ogawa’s new collection of short stories, Like Smoke, Like Light, she explains why this choice was an essential one for her.

YUKIMI OGAWA:

Years ago, somewhere on the internet, I saw someone remark that they thought people in Japanese anime were all white, a very weird observation that does not make sense. My first reaction was, “What, do you think we Japanese people see white people as those who have pink hair and purple eyes?”

This was the very first spark of the Colorful Island stories, which constitute almost half of Like Smoke, Like Light, my first collection of short stories. (Most, but not all, of the other half deals with yōkai, beings from my country’s folklore.) On this island that I imagined, you can find all the beautiful colors of jewelry on human skin, and the nation as a whole survives by showing these colorful and patterned people off to the other parts of the world.

After I wrote the first story in this world, “The Colorless Thief,” I realized I wanted to create a place where the rarity of the skin colors and patterns is all that matters—where your gender, age, or the family you were born to won’t do anything for you if you cannot offer what the government wants from you. And if these colors and patterns are so precious, so important, then they must be genuine, I reasoned. Like natural gems versus synthetic ones, you have to be born with the colors or patterns, and artificially adding patterns to your skin or altering your patterns in any way should be very obscene, or even a crime.

In the earlier stories set in this world, “The Colorless Thief,” “Ever Changing, Ever Turning,” and “Blue Gray Blue,” I explored how the colorful and patterned people, who are supposedly the elites of their nation, have to deal with their fear of losing what they have. It was fun and heartbreaking at the same time to write about them—when your colors change, the way the whole society treats you changes, and then your world is not the same anymore. Then later on, the character of Kiriko came along. Kiriko is a completely colorless and patternless person, who has been forced to work in the “backcloth” of the city—an unimportant laborer employed at an atelier that sells patterned goods, like fabrics for furniture including curtains and table cloths.

That is not the only thing the atelier does, though; she and her partner can mitigate physical discomfort like headaches and allergic reactions by drawing patterns on human skin. However, in this island where it’s so important that patterns be “genuine,” she and her partner cannot fully exert their skills, at least not openly.. Despite the challenges, she cannot help but feel grateful that she found this job, doing what she loves every day no matter what others may think of her. 

Through Kiriko’s eyes, I was able to add more texture to the island. Those first three stories were more about losing something you always took for granted, but Kiriko knows what it is like to have nothing in the first place. Conversing with her in my mind, she and I came to agree that there is only so much we can do about the world around us—but in her stories, I let her search for a shape of the world with which she can cope, even if she isn’t entirely comfortable with that shape. 

I think one of the reasons I chose English as my writing language lies near this conversation. English is my second language, as you can probably see when you read this book, and I still fumble for command of it. I cannot speak it most of the time. I’ve been wondering why I do this; I’m a slow writer to start with, and engaging in the second language further slows the process. There are things I cannot express in English. 

But after seeing my stories gathered in one book, the stories that I had to take so much trouble, to go so out of my way, to complete, I think I have a better idea of why. I did not, do not, like many things about myself and my life, and I needed a way to change it, even if in fiction: chiseling it and pruning it, and painting it over and polishing it.

As a writer, I needed a tool that I acquired, instead of something I’ve always had, always taken for granted. I still worry about not being up to the standards of the world, but I’d like to believe that the world shouldn’t have the ability to bend me. That I want to be the one who can choose the shape of the world around me. And the distance from the world that my second language gives me somehow became a sort of shield, when I need to deal with that world’s raw, unwanted shape. 

Like Smoke, Like Light: Amazon|Amazon UK|Amazon CA|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author Socials: Goodreads|Twitter

The Big Idea: Jean Marie Ward

Posted on May 25, 2023    Posted by Athena Scalzi      4 Comments

Sometimes, it takes more than one try to really nail down a story. In author Jean Marie Ward’s case, the third time was the charm, resulting in her new novel, Siren Bridge. Read on to see how each iteration of this story came together to form this final novel.

JEAN MARIE WARD:

I stole the first Big Idea for my novella Siren Bridge from my late writing partner, Teri Smith.

Shortly before her death, Teri began a series about a deliciously, cheerfully, unapologetically evil sorceress named Vivienne. Viv’s first adventure, “Dragon Bait”, was published in the 2009 anthology Under the Rose. But Teri left the second barely begun, with Viv’s big personality trapped in the body of a small calico cat.

I wanted to finish that story as a tribute to Teri. On a more selfish level, I wanted to figure out how Viv rescued herself. But hard as I tried, I couldn’t get the story to gel. 

Which brings me to the second Big Idea I stole.

A few years later, an editor invited me to participate in a mermaid-themed anthology. As I sifted through potential story ideas, it occurred to me that, instead of trying to finish Teri’s story, I should write an entirely new Viv adventure—a funny one, of course. Viv was born for comedy. All I needed was a finny foil. How about a siren with the delivery of a Wagnerian soprano? Great! And she’ll sing about…

That’s when my muse went AWOL. I needed a profoundly silly way for my soggy Sieglinda to lure men to their doom, and I had nada. So I decided to consult an expert in the whole guy thing: my husband, “Honey, what’s the most ridiculous thing a siren could sing about would that persuade a guy to offer himself as lunch?”

He blinked at me behind his glasses. “Like what, dessert?” 

“That’s it!” I cried. “Struuuuuudel!”

My husband immediately decamped to the basement. I didn’t see him again for two days. When he finally emerged, he pleaded with me to never ever yodel again.

The anthology got shelved. But flushed with pride at my achievement, I sent it to an editor friend who knew Teri’s work. As gently as possible, he let me know my protagonist. Was. Not. Viv. In D&D terms, my character was chaotic good. There were lines she wouldn’t cross. Viv had no such scruples.

He was right. But I liked the story. It needed a lot of work. Even so, the scene between Not-Viv and her siren nemesis? That was pure gold, worth every rewrite it took to raise the rest of the story to its level.

Which brings me to the novella’s third Big Idea, my Big Idea: What I wanted for my protagonist and her world.

I wanted a woman protagonist who leaned into her nature and fell into the exciting scrapes traditionally reserved for male characters like Han Solo and Robert Downey Jr.’s Sherlock Holmes. I wanted Oleander Jones, the character formerly known as Not-Viv, to live in a world I wouldn’t mind carrying in my head for as long as it took to write her adventures. A Steampunk/weird west world with magic, great clothes, and marvelous contraptions. A world where diversity is celebrated. A world where even the worst curse could hold the key to happiness if you own the courage to grasp it.

I admit it’s a fairy tale. The United States grew to greatness in the American West. But our forebears committed unspeakable acts in the name of that dream, and their legacy is one we have yet to fully confront. But I cling to the hope that Neil Gaiman’s wonderful paraphrase of G.K. Chesterton got it right: “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”

Science fiction, fantasy, romance, adventure, mystery—all the genres we call fiction are simply fairy tales grown-ups tell themselves. This is mine:

Oleander Jones knew the rules for successful lady adventurers, and she broke them all. 

Now she’s got a reward on her head bigger than the Logressan national debt. The New Dominion Territorial Militia, the full detecting might of Falchion Apprehension Services, and every no-good one-eyed snake who could read a wanted poster are on her tail. And there’s only one way to get where she needs to go—through the killing ground of the biggest, meanest, man-eating, avian monster Roche County has ever seen. Dead across Siren Bridge.

Strudel, anyone?

Siren Bridge: Amazon   

Author socials: Facebook|Twitter

The Big Idea: William C. Tracy

Posted on May 23, 2023    Posted by Athena Scalzi      4 Comments

Don’t judge a book by its cover. Or in this case, don’t judge a monster by its mushrooms. Author William C. Tracy’s Big Idea brings us back into The Biomass Conflux series with his newest novel, To A Fungus Unknown.

WILLIAM C. TRACY:

Forty years after landing on Lida, the colony still isn’t finished.

Agetha has survived many more battles than she anticipated when she first landed on her new home planet. She’s older and wiser, has gained family and lost loved ones. And yet her reward for four decades of service is to be pushed to the colony’s outer edges with the other aging Generationals.

But that was only the beginning of her adventure.

The biomass has spent years studying the intruders who landed on its surface, carving a new home from its very essence. Never satisfied in its attempt to communicate with this new and invasive species, finally it has found a way to express its intentions. The colonists may never be the same.

Discover the fate of the colony in the second book of The Biomass Conflux trilogy.

Life on a fungus planet, or “Oops, I accidently wrote body horror.”

This is the second book in my eventual trilogy about colonists landing on a planet covered by sentient fungus. Now that I’d gotten all the preliminary introductions and worldbuilding out of the way (which you can read about in my previous Big Idea post here), I was planning to have a lot of fun with this one!

I started writing it, and immediately introduced a new character—one who was already influenced by the sentient biomass. Thinking and writing about a loss of control is one of the scariest things for me, partially because my mother suffered with early-onset Alzheimer’s, and I’m potentially at risk for it as well.

Exploring this loss of control turned out to be cathartic in some sense, as I could write characters who either didn’t remember what they had done or didn’t understand why they were doing what they did, or in the worst case, could see their body doing one thing when they were desperately trying to do another.

To make it better (or perhaps worse?), the biomass doesn’t think like we do. It doesn’t understand human individuality. So, it simply suppresses the parts of the people who are screaming about the loss of control and makes them unconcerned about what’s happening to them. Everyone wins, right? People are mind-controlled, but don’t feel bad about it.

The whole book took on a creepy overtone as I started to flesh out this concept, but this horror aspect gave me a chance to lean into another aspect I like to write about: finding out the monster is not who you think it is. Humans, being human, will strive to their last breath to get out of any sort of confinement, even a mental one.

Once that happens in this story, the human colonists can be in direct contact with an alien being who thinks completely differently than them. I wrote three different avenues of contact at the same time. One unconscious, one very intentional and scientific, and another through rational realization and putting together pieces of a puzzle. Once we understand how to communicate with a monster, then those parts that are horrific start to become more reasonable, or at least understood, if still not desirable.

What does an intelligence that spans a planet think like? Does it have a concept of language or math when a gestalt mind can comprehend everything at once? When it drills down to specifics, is the whole intelligence concentrating on that one thing, or can such an intelligence even lose focus at all?

These questions are not answered yet, but I’m very interested to find out more about them in the third book. However, there’s another side to consider: the humans. There are a bunch of different ways to react to finding out the thing completely surrounding the colony is not only alive, but conscious of what the people are doing there. And that point will lead into the third book of the series, where people choose what side to take, and in return, which side the biomass chooses to take!

For now, I hope you enjoy the first two books of The Biomass Conflux, with the conclusion to come in early 2024. If you haven’t read the first book yet, you can find Of Mycelium and Men here and an intermediate short story, Down Among the Mushrooms, here.

To A Fungus Unknown: Amazon

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The Big Idea: Scott Fulford

Posted on May 18, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      8 Comments

How was the state of your wallet during the prime pandemic years? As Scott Fulford explains in this Big Idea for The Pandemic Paradox, for many Americans it was not nearly as bad as it could have been, and indeed, possibly the opposite.

SCOTT FULFORD:

The novel coronavirus suddenly seemed to be everywhere in March 2020. We didn’t know much yet about how to treat it, how it spread, or how deadly it was. To halt its spread, many businesses shut down, furloughing or sending employees home to figure out how to work remotely. Twenty-two million people were fired over the next month. Others had to keep going to work in person, facing terrifying new risks. As our workplaces, churches, schools, and daycares shut down, we were increasingly isolated, cut off from social connections.

My wife and I spent the pandemic juggling two full-time remote jobs and our two small boys who were four months and four years old at the start of the pandemic. We sewed (bad and uncomfortable) masks out of an old pillow case and baked (delicious) sandwich bread when we couldn’t buy any at the store. We worried about our kids who seemed to be growing up thinking grandma was an interactive video.

But I also worried about the financial misery that millions of families were about to experience. As an economist, I study the financial ups and downs that people face and how they deal with them. A survey I’d conducted the year before the pandemic found that 40 percent of families could cover their expenses for less than a month if they lost their main source of income.

As unemployment reached a level we hadn’t seen since the Great Depression, my research suggested that financial pain was soon to come. And it would spread, as unemployed families reduced their spending, causing more businesses to lay off staff.

But here’s the surprise and the big idea for my book: the financial health of the average U.S. household actually improved from January 2020 to June 2020 by just about any measure. Of course, some households were doing worse financially than before the pandemic and there was a great deal of unfairness—from essential workers who would have been better financially if they had been fired to small business funding that often bypassed Black-owned businesses but helped larger, less affected, white-owned businesses. But on average, most households were doing better financially.

How did this paradox arise? While the full story is more complicated, it largely comes down to two surprises.

The first surprise was the effective policy response. The federal government spent around five times as much in response to the pandemic as it did following the 2008 financial crisis. That money supported the newly unemployed, sent most U.S. residents thousands of dollars whether they were unemployed or not, and gave money to almost all small (and many not so small) businesses.

The second surprise was that many people spent less. They didn’t go on vacations or go out to restaurants or do so many other things that make life fun. Because of the effective policy response, most households’ incomes didn’t go down, so savings built up, helping protect more people from financial shocks. People later spent some of that money buying stuff, causing the epic supply chain snarls and inflation in 2021 and 2022.

My new book, The Pandemic Paradox: How the COVID Crisis Made Americans More Financially Secure, explains this paradox and the many other changes wrought by the pandemic. In the months following March 2020, I conducted more surveys and briefed government officials about what was going on so they could make informed decisions. Everyone was hungry to understand the rapidly changing world. I realized that the work I was doing—explaining what we knew, and often did not know, about the economic and social changes occurring—could help others understand the new world.

Economics has surprising overlaps with speculative fiction. Economics is most often asking the question: “What if?” For example, it’s impossible to ask: “What did the pandemic change?” without implicitly asking: “What if the pandemic didn’t happen?” And good speculative fiction is often built around the same question by imagining a world where different technologies or magics exist and asking: What would be different and how would society work?

Of course, good speculative fiction has to then tell a good story, while good economics does not. In my book, I wanted to bridge this gap by connecting bigger societal changes to individual stories. So I drew on the surveys I conducted to tell some of the individual stories that make up the big story of this crazy time. The story of Sofia (not her real name) whose finances were precarious after she lost her job in March 2020 and missed a mortgage payment but, with the help of expanded unemployment and other relief, was financially better off in June 2020 than before the pandemic. Of Marcus, who also lost his job, but who pandemic aid policies missed and ended up selling his possessions to make ends meet. And of Marvin, who retired early after being fired and was worried his savings wouldn’t last.

After all, the story of the pandemic is millions of individual stories, combining and interacting in surprising ways. Some stories were painful and sad. Other stories were about new freedoms, such as new financial stability, starting a new business, or the flexibility of remote work. We all had our unique pandemic experience and I hope the book helps us understand each other’s experiences, and the pandemic’s larger consequences for our economy and society. 

The views expressed here and in the book are the author’s and not necessarily the views of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or the United States.

The Pandemic Paradox: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop | Princeton University Press  

Author socials: Personal site | Twitter