Sometimes you just gotta create art in the face of awfulness

One of my big struggles has been knowing what I want out of life, and knowing that there are people who’ve done those things, and done so with arrogance, snobbery and, in general, a shit attitude. When I started indie releasing science fiction books, it was from a broken place. I’d gotten [bad] advice from a literary agent that women don’t read books written by men (not true!), and that men don’t read books, period. It stuck with me, as did a failure of a book release.

So, I found a genre I enjoyed growing up, and ventured into it. Still broken, I decided not to bother with finding a publisher. I’d go indie. When I got hit with advice from a well-known indie that there was no reason to bother marketing until you had at least three books available, knowing it took me years to write the two I’d written before, that made me walk away from it for a while.

That didn’t mean I stopped writing. In fact, the beginning of Iconoclast was written after this. I had ideas that needed to be expressed, and a certainty that writing straight forward, commercial science fiction would not work to express those opinions. My kids were born, Trump was elected, and I was working a media job, so I set it aside. That book got set aside up until I finished the first draft of it in late 2021. By that point, I’d returned to indie publishing, releasing more books in that initial series, and penning another series that was far more successful using modern indie publishing techniques.

That sense of urgency in 2021 was Jeff Bezos blasting himself into space. You see, this book was about a billionaire (a quintillionaire in the book, because of the future and all that) who saw space as his own plaything, and along with his other quintillionaire cohorts, made a pact to keep space for themselves. The original intent was that Earth was going to suffer from overpopulation, then need to turn to the stars. That didn’t happen, so instead, the antagonist in the book came up with a way to digitize information from someone’s brain, and monetized it by selling digital afterlife packages to people, where your brain was kept on a server, and when you died, your brain would live on experiencing whatever your plan was.

Cooperation with local governments and large religious organizations made it a standard, and the scheme unfolded in a way that there were only a few companies who operated in space and in the digital afterlife business. If you couldn’t pay, you would need to work on their respective stations in space instead.

Seeing Bezos blast into space, then take Shatner with him, and Shatner, who is a known blowhard and egotist, is trying to explain the profundity of the experience going into space, and how small and precious Earth was. That we needed to protect our lovely planet, and Bezos literally couldn’t give a shit. Bezos interrupted him by spraying champagne everywhere and the look on Shatner’s face was an understanding that Bezos took him because it was a neat stunt to take Captain Kirk into space, not to find out how profound the experience was for Shatner, a man who’s entire career centered around space and exploration.

… This all put a sense of urgency into this book for me. I’d long been a detractor of the ultra wealthy, which included Bezos and Musk, and at the time, it wasn’t popular yet. Musk was still ‘The Real Life Tony Stark’ and Teslas were still impossible to get in a timely manner symbols of being a ‘Good Liberal’ in the US. I’d known wealthy people who’d used the media to create their own mythos, and I saw through Musk, but you know.

These people are evil and getting passes to destroy everything that makes us and our planet wonderful. There’s no shades of gray here. When William Shatner is forced to reckon with understanding he’d made a deal with the devil and been used as a promotional stunt, it should be a clarion call to the rest of us.

So, I worked away at it. By the time I was happy with it and sending out feelers to agents and publishers, something happened in indie publishing. I was already burnt out on the idea of churning out books in 6-8 weeks to keep up with the readers and not be forgotten. It was not conducive to creating art. Then along came generative AI, and I got to see firsthand authors go from “I use it to draft up ideas” to “I use it to create drafts” and everything in between.

These weren’t my people.

I decided I needed to find some way to work around this. The problem was this book was too long, too weird and too risky for seemingly everyone. There’s a lot to it. The book industry in general had slid too far into the abyss all around me. Who were my people, anyway? It’s been long enough that when I finally made the decision to release it in a way I knew worked, I’m not even sure my readers remember me. It’s been over two years since I released a book.

Now, I watch as the US gov’t is torn to shreds by the wealthiest man on Earth, at the behest of a wealthy criminal conman who is sitting in his second term as President, and seemingly passing along the wishes of his wealthy donors as to what should be gutted. It’s clear that science fiction’s time serving as a cautionary tale has passed. The proliferation of greed and its marriage with technology has made any kind of terrible future I could dream up obsolete by the time I’ve ruminated on the finished work.

Instead, I present Iconoclast as a blueprint. That art should criticize those with power. That art should challenge ideas and institutions instead of kowtow to them. Art should be dangerous and incisive. I spent years afraid of creating “art” because it wouldn’t help me make a living. So I toiled away at things I thought other people would like, while I myself wasn’t happy with what I was producing. It never went far enough. I have no idea who is in my corner and who isn’t. No idea what anyone expects from me, wants from me, or demands from me. I just know that I’m doing what I’m doing, and there’s no turning back.

Does this book go far enough? Probably not. But it’s here to bridge a gap and I can’t wait for you to read it.

You can pre-order Iconoclast from your favorite retail outlet, or directly from me. Click here to check it out.