Maxine Unleashes Doomsday is somewhat of a departure from what most people probably know you for, such as the “Love & Bullets” trilogy and Boise Longpig Hunting Club. There are familiar noir and crime aspects to Maxine, but it’s also unquestionably grounded in dystopian sci-fi. Was it a deliberate decision to branch out a bit, or was it simply a matter that this story was bouncing around in your head and demanded to be told?
It’s not an exaggeration to say I’ve wanted to write a dystopian novel since I was a teenager, when my dad gave me a copy of Ballard’s The Drowned World (which the first section of Maxine pays semi-homage to, by virtue of being set in a flooded, futuristic Manhattan). I’d tried all sorts of stories and versions over the past twenty years but nothing really worked until I married some dystopian concepts with noir and crime fiction, which is my comfort zone.
Even then, it was something of a fraught journey. Usually I outline and write my books in fairly short order but Maxine was done in fits and starts over a four-year period. Originally I focused on a narrow band of Maxine’s adult life, but I became increasingly obsessed with how she got to that point, as well as where her decisions would eventually lead her. As is probably appropriate for dystopian fiction, it ends up being a story of someone who simply doesn’t give up, even though the world takes pretty much everything from her.
I called it a departure of sorts for you, but on the other hand, when you start stripping things down there seems to be a fair amount of overlap, common DNA if you will, between noir/crime fiction and cyberpunk. As Maxine Unleashes Doomsday progresses, and society around her collapses, we get more aspects of cyberpunk in the mix, including her interaction with an artificial intelligence called Pig. Was Pig specifically included to be commentary on the direction of AI’s evolution and the potential dangers, or did the Pig character just occur naturally as things played out while writing?
Pig is where I think “digital assistants” such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google Assistant might end up in a truly dystopian timeline. Right now, A.I. is really rudimentary and specialized, but there are attempts to make it friendly and human-like—it seems like every time I talk to my Google Home (which I leave unplugged a lot of the time; I’m a bit paranoid about where those sound clips are going), the voice gets a little bit more chipper and colloquial.
To me, Pig is what happens if an A.I. with that “chipper” programming gets out of control—it’s sarcastic and unable to stop insulting people. And then on top of it, yeah, I wanted to illustrate what could happen if we allow these platforms to develop unfettered; you could have an A.I. that tries to unleash massive destruction not because it hates the human race (i.e., like Skynet in the Terminator films) but because it’s curious, emotional, and trying to figure things out. A little bit too human, in other words.
On the writing side of things, Pig was great fun to create. If I do a sequel, I’d like to unleash it even more.
As is not atypical for dystopian sci-fi, there’s a fair amount of world-building involved in Maxine Unleashes Doomsday, which takes place at a time when the United States as we know it has collapsed into divided territories, with varying degrees of civilization and law depending on where one is fortunate, or unfortunate, enough to live. Given the need to create and bring readers into a setting they were not entirely familiar with, did your approach to and process of writing Maxine vary any from one of your more straightforward crime fiction outings?
It varied considerably. When plotting and writing crime fiction, I really like to visit the places my characters visit, and try to do whatever they do (within legal bounds). For example, if a character fires a particular kind of gun, I like to go out and fire that kind of gun. But with sci-fi, you don’t really have that ability to do as much hands-on research; you’re left with trying to find analogies from real life that fit best.
All that being said, the world of Maxine isn’t that different from our own in a lot of ways, so the writing wasn’t radically different than with crime fiction—I just had to bear down a little harder with my imagination and picture a main character owning a genetically engineered velociraptor, for example, instead of a pit bull.
Though the setting is futuristic, there are aspects to it that feel disturbingly real, not unimaginably too far around the corner in a worst-case scenario. Was it a conscious decision to ground Maxine’s world in surroundings that are easy to extrapolate from events happening in the world right now, both political- and climate-related?
Very much so, and as the drafts progressed, I actually adjusted the narrative to reflect whatever was going on. I wrote some sections of the book in 2014, when the real world seemed very much on somewhat of a different track; I put the book aside for a year and change to work on what would become A Brutal Bunch of Heartbroken Saps and Slaughterhouse Blues, the first two books in the “Love & Bullets” trilogy.
When I came back to working seriously on Maxine in 2016-17, the world had obviously changed considerably. Climate change seemed to be accelerating far more rapidly than scientists had previously estimated, and our political discourse was becoming so polarizing that it was very easy to see a U.S. version of Balkanization occurring. My old version of the manuscript seemed positively sedate by comparison; I had to make things even more extreme. Now that the book is out, I wonder how much of it is going to come true. I hope it doesn’t, but I’ve never been an optimist.
Have we seen the last of Maxine and Pig? What’s up next for you?
That is an excellent question! The way the book ends, there’s a lot of runway for a sequel, but we’ll see how readers respond and how it does. Up next, I’m working on a sequel to Boise Longpig Hunting Club, and then I’m outlining a horror novel that I hope to start writing relatively soon. But deep in my mind, Maxine’s still talking to me.
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