Questions for the author

I wrote this book while scooping up the remains of an incredibly emotionally intense time of my life. It was my attempt to deal with the emotional and physical repercussions of an immensely abusive work relationship, years of exploitation, mind games and pressure to self-sacrifice. It was not out of a sense of self-pleasing or lofty want, but rather a deep-seated necessity to walk the path of rediscovery of who I am, and even more importantly, want and could be. I wanted to create something which can be shared, enjoyed, discussed, analyzed and learned from. While I initially set out to entertain, I quickly felt obligated to offer what I have learned, experienced, contemplated and gained. I delight if I can amuse my readers. I celebrate if I can enlighten them. I can only dream of providing associable characters, relatable feelings and support in the form of little tricks and ideas to improve their lives.

The future is a marvelous mirror of the present. The thoughts of what could, should and might be allow us to analyze where, who and how we are. I think now more than ever we all have to ask ourselves where we want to go, what we want to strive for, and ultimately, what we want to avoid becoming. Humanity is stubborn and will make it work. I am interested in what it might look like, who could be in charge, and how it will all be. Then we can decide what needs to change, to achieve what is envisioned.

I set out to create a believable futuristic end-stage capitalist-ruled society in space, complete with its own expectations, rules, beliefs and (counter-!) cultures. I wanted to cover macro-economic and societal aspects like corporate expectations dictating lifestyles and mindsets to everyday occurrences like minimalistic personal zones due to living in cramped environments, the ever-present looming hand of mercantilism in the shape of corporate jingles, speech patterns and advertisements.

There are so many people seeking, questioning, discovering, sharing, learning, developing, coping, believing and much more. This audience in my opinion is the strongest, most eager, curious, and willing while at the same time the most abandoned in their journey of self-discovery in a world which seemingly does not care for them, only the exploitability of their labor and financial capital.

While I did not set out to do so, I have accomplished creating a diverse cast of primary and secondary figures representing a wide array of personalities, attitudes, gender identities, and facets of masculinity and femininity. It is of the utmost importance to me to offer my readers believably competent and multi-dimensional characters with their own lives, beliefs and behavioral patterns, as well as delivering them a relatable cast and struggles to identify with. My goal, aside from simply entertaining is to ultimately inspire readers to pursue their own goals, offering support through my writing to possibly assist them in finding themselves and to spurn them on to spread positivity, kindness and support to others, as is exemplified by the actors in this intertwined story about identity, love and (personal) strength.

I was exposed to English media before I could even read. We used to get the British Cartoon Network channel, and growing up, I was exposed to an incredibly unhealthy diet of inappropriate video games, ineffectively age-rated movies and shows in English, or in the case of the crème de la crème of 90s anime, with English subtitles. This nutritional intake laden with wild action, manufactured love, brutal violence, deeply soaked in melancholy and filled to the brim with stereotypes, tropes and clichés shaped much of my child-hood.

I rode along outlaws in spaghetti westerns and through space, chased criminals and conspirators flanked by Major Kusanagi and Spike Spiegel, halted spice production on both the tv and computer screen with Paul Muad’Dib Atreides, beat up the regular cast of ne'er-do-wells with Bud Spencer and Terence Hill, was shocked and drawn in by the casual brutality of Takeshi Kitano’s works, endlessly ecstatic over the beautiful and biting humor of the daily lives of Jacques Tati’s characters, in tears over to the absurdist humor of Monthy Python’s Flying Circus and Helge Schneider, became a permanent and drenched resident of Rapture, chased demonic hordes off Phobos, lost over three months of my life and my heart to the world-changing love between a Replika unit and her Gestalt wife, and am forever changed by the music of Trent Reznor, Frank Klepacki, Ennio Morricone, Jesper Kyd and Quentin Malapel, which perfectly set the mood for my writing process. Aside from the already mentioned, I would like to credit Elizabeth Bear, Becky Chambers, Audrey Coulthourst, Grace Curtis, Zoe Hana Mikuta and many, many more magnificent artists for their, in my case, life-saving works.

Just make it exist first. You can make it good later.