Lattice and Writing

*This transcript is produced using transcription software and reviewed for quality. Despite our best efforts, some passages may be incomplete or contain errors due to audio quality or software limitations.*

Matthew
and welcome to this episode of Superhero Ethics. Friends, a lot of times we sit and talk about what did the author mean, why did the author have this happen, how do you pronounce the weird science fiction words that the author wrote. Today we have the author with us: Pete Wright, well-known podcaster, one of the founders of the TruStory FM family of podcasts, a person who podcasts about Marvel, about ADHD, about eight million other things. He’s written a number of books. His first one that came out was called Lattice, a science fiction novella. And we have him here along with my co-host Paul Christopher Hoppe to talk about that book. Pete, how are we doing today?

Pete
We’re doing all right, Matthew. I’m thrilled to be here. A little nervous, a little nervous.

Matthew
I think it’s going to be a fun conversation, and I’m going to start with a really hard-hitting question. Forominum? Ferminum? Ferminium?

Pete
Is it Ferominium? I’ll go with Ferominium. Is it British? Yeah, Ferominium sounds better than the British version. Ferraminium? Sure, okay, Ferominium. There’s a lot of background to some of these words.

Matthew
Well, what we know is that it is not as powerful as the human body, and we’ll get into more of that discussion. We’re going to have a spoiler section about the book, because mostly this isn’t a review podcast. This is where we like to talk about science fiction issues, ethics questions, all that stuff, and this book raises some great ones: everything from father-son dynamics and family dynamics to larger issues of space travel and science fiction, to basic questions of criminal justice and politics and capitalism and business and how they all interact. Stuff that has a lot of relevance for our own world, like most good science fiction. We want you to buy the book, obviously, so if you have not read it yet, please go read it. You can find it in a number of ways.

All those links are going to be in the show notes. Definitely buy a copy, it’s pretty cheap, it’s a great book. Paul, you think you read it in like two hours?

Paul
It was three hours and seventeen minutes. I don’t know, I time things sometimes. I could have read it faster, but it’s very cinematic, and I like to really picture what’s going on, as opposed to just seeing what happens.

Matthew
So if you’ve not read it, please do, then come back and hit pause. Most of this is going to be a spoiler section, but just to whet the appetite a little more for the book, we’ll talk about it a bit in a non-spoiler section first.

Pete, let me start by asking: this is a novella, which is not a format we see very often. I would love to see more of them, because it’s a really fun read. And as you said, Paul, it’s cinematic, you get the whole story. Why did you choose a novella?

Pete
Well, it was actually sort of a choice of necessity. I’ve been writing for many, many years, and I’d never published anything. I guess I need to go back a little bit, if it’s not too self-indulgent. I ended up getting published for nonfiction, and co-wrote a book with my co-host on the ADHD podcast, about ADHD. That was extraordinary, and Wiley Publishing was fantastic. They were very confident in us and in the book, and they liked my style a lot and said this was great. So I got a lot of puffery around the writing, and I thought, well, wait a minute, why am I not doing anything with the fiction I’ve been writing for years? I’m on another podcast called Craft and Chaos with Kyle Olson and Ryan Dalton, who’s a YA fiction writer in his own right, and Misty Stinnett. And they dared me to dust off an old project, resuscitate it, and bring it to life.

That started me down a bit of a rabbit hole and led to Lattice. This original story was one I wrote in high school for my senior creative writing thesis project. It was a delight, and it was full of all the crazy science fiction words a high school kid would come up with. So I spent probably three months rewriting it, keeping the stuff I loved because it was part of my youth, and recognizing that it has all kinds of things I might have changed if I didn’t love that guy who wrote the book originally. Then I thought the novella was a very sweet spot, because I also really enjoyed writing this character, Jax, also known as Perry Jacks.

I thought, I bet there are other Jax stories I can tell after this one. And wouldn’t it be fun to have a character I can play with in different locations, and talk about larger issues I’m fascinated by and clearly have been for years: institutional systems that are objectively wrong but unstoppable because of their own systemic momentum. I just love all of those things. And I figure these short, character-driven stories are actually a good tableau for these kinds of conversations.

Matthew
That makes a lot of sense in two ways. First, I was going to say it felt like a throwback to older science fiction, in that, obviously it’s always interesting, like the 1950s idea of the 2000s, five hundred years in the future, they’d never thought of iPhones. It’s hard to imagine, kind of like how the original Star Trek had monochrome screens because they just couldn’t have another technology for it. So when I was reading it, I was wondering, were you doing an intentional throwback to the science fiction of our childhoods? No, you just read it, wrote

Pete
science fiction of my childhood. It’s actually really funny. There are little things in there, and I’m, if it’s spoiler territory writ large, working on the next Jax book right now, and I’m really intentional about when they use paper. There is still paper on space stations, and that’s important to me. I like that there’s a broken printer under a clerk’s desk. That makes me viscerally happy.

Matthew
And I’m thrilled to hear there’s going to be another Jax book coming soon, because this felt episodic in a way, and it’s obviously a pivotal incident in Jax’s life.

It felt kind of like a season one finale. I can easily see this being, I love Lawrence Block. I don’t know if you’ve read his stuff, but Matthew Scudder is one of my favorite characters. He’s a private detective, and in every book there’s a murder mystery, but he’s also a recovering alcoholic. He solves murders as a way to not drink. Most of the book is about him dealing with that while also solving a murder by the end of it.

Yes, and I love books like that. Paul introduced me to a TV show based on novels about a character named Sharpe, the Sharpe’s Rifles books, about a character in the Napoleonic Wars. In each story there’s some character development, but it’s also just the story of the day. So this feels, like I said, kind of like a season finale, but an episode. I love knowing we can get more of those.

Pete
For sure, for sure. When you look at Jax as a character, this is a difficult part of his life, and you might imagine there are next chapters that deal with: why won’t the systems I’m a part of let me grieve? Why does the system keep me living in such a raw, unsettled space? And also, I’m going to try to solve a mystery too.

Matthew
Well, I want to mostly talk about those questions in the book itself, we’ll get to those in the spoiler section. But Paul and I also talk a lot about the art of writing itself, so Paul, I know you had a couple of questions you wanted to ask about how this was written.

Paul
Yeah, why did you choose to make it a novella? Matthew just took my main question. My other question, well, first I just want to say I love a novella. My first thing was a flash fiction folio, a bunch of really short, really weird stories I probably wouldn’t read, but I wrote them. And then the next thing was a novelette, which isn’t quite long enough to be a novel but is too long to be a short story. That was just what the story asked for, in my opinion. I think a lot of novels, I’d probably enjoy them more if they were novellas. Not to get into actual spoilers, but I did feel like each chapter had a clear purpose in the narrative arc, and there wasn’t a lot of stuff that felt like a writer saying, “I need to stretch this out,” or adding what we call filler episodes in TV shows. So I just wanted to appreciate the novella form, and being able to comfortably read something in one day.

I think there’s a lot of value to that. It’s like sitting down to watch a movie that’s not a four-hour movie where you’re like, maybe we’ll do half today and take an intermission. To me it felt like the right length for the story, and clearly there could have been more backstory for each character, but it doesn’t feel necessary, it doesn’t feel like what the story needed.

So I just wanted to appreciate that choice, even if it was born of necessity, and the format in general. Now that we read ebooks a lot more than just paperback books, it’s easier, you can write a story of whatever length and just put it out there, and people can get it.

As opposed to the novel, which I think is largely built around the idea that a book should be about this thick, so people can read the title on the spine in a bookstore, and so on.

Right. My other question was whether you’re more of an outliner or more of a pantser, basically how much structure you have ahead of time. Here it sounds like there was a deconstruction of the structure and then kind of a rebuild.

Pete
That’s exactly how it happened, figuring out what the story was as I found it, first printed on dot matrix paper.

I had to tear it apart, and as I was rewriting it, figure out what it is that this wants to say. Why did I, as a high school student, pick something like deep institutionalized violence? This is a story I felt I needed to tell. And I feel like the world sort of grew into that choice even more aptly than I could have expected.

Paul
I wanted, maybe, or wanted for sure. I’m usually a pantser, I usually just sit and write, and I’m a huge fan of National Novel Writing Month. May it rest in peace.

Pete
Yeah, that actually helped me. What you’re seeing in this era of mine right now is a clearing of old creative debts. I’ve got a number of books I’m just polishing and publishing, and I’m really excited about doing that.

And to your point about pantsing and plotting, I definitely disintegrated Lattice, re-outlined it, and rewrote it. And the next book is meticulously outlined, because now I have a vision for an arc. Where is this going, not over two books, but like six?

You know, when could we package it as a compendium and have a complete reading experience, where you can read a whole story in a day and then come back and know there’s another story to come. That appeals to me. I love those books, collections of longer short stories, things I can invest in but also know I can finish and go do the dishes.

Matthew
Especially because, and I think it’s hard to talk about without spoilers so we’ll leave most of it for the spoiler section, you ended up creating a world where a new thing is introduced in this book that’s obviously going to be a big part of everyone’s life going forward.

I think that’s one way of setting up the themes. The question of what you wrote in the past versus what you’d write today lets me ask one last question before we go into spoilers. When I was reading this book, I saw a theme that’s clearly influenced by something that happened recently, and I love it.

I’m wondering, did you predict this, or did you let yourself be influenced by it? The opening scenes of the book are about our hero, who’s a private investigator and does other things related to that, including bounty hunting, space bounty hunting. I couldn’t help thinking, when I first read it without knowing that, that this is one of the things we’re going to get in a post-Mandalorian universe. I love this.

So I’m wondering, did you have the idea of bounty hunting in space long before The Mandalorian, or did that show up more in the rewrites, in part because of that fellow in the helmet? Oh my god, DeFro.

Pete
I’m back, I’m back. I wanted to make sure you got to the end of your sentence, I think I know where it ended. I’m going to tell you, maybe it was influenced straight up by The Empire Strikes Back. That’s when I was writing this story originally, so you actually asked a question that’s more prescient than you know.

Paul
So it was someone in a Mandalorian helmet?

Pete
It may have been somebody in a helmet, but not that one. Which is kind of exciting, I’ve never actually thought about that. But no, the bones of the story that are in this book are the bones that were originally written. The character was there.

Matthew
I’m glad we’re able to talk about how the bones of the story crystallized for you.

Pete
Well played, I noticed that. I think Paul noticed it too.

Matthew
I wasn’t trying to hide it, “at my girlfriend’s sister’s apartment,” pun intended, it’s a line early in the book. It’s fantastic. We’re going to move now into the spoiler section, so if you haven’t read it, please check the show notes. Pete, what’s your website?

Pete
ItsMePete.com.

Matthew
Great website, you’ve got your books and your writing there. So yes, it’s in the show notes. I’ll also say, in the show notes, if you want to support other authors: our own Paul Christopher Hoppe has a book out, Zen Madman’s Friday Night Is My Monday Morning, Volume 1. It’s a great collection. That is a brilliant title.

Paul
It’s a mouthful. Thank you, thank you.

Pete
That’s a freaking brilliant title.

Matthew
I wanted to call it FNM to the power of three, but I was vetoed on that. There we go.

Paul
Yeah, the lace of rules.

Matthew
Both are great, all the ways to purchase them are in the show notes, please do so. Entering the spoiler section in three, two, one. I don’t know if Soylent Green is people, but alternative energy is people. For those of you who haven’t read the book but hopefully still are going to, and just want to hear the discussion, I’m going to give a brief summary of the plot. Pete, of course, jump in if I get something wrong. We basically have three stories happening around the same time that all come to intermingle.

One story is about people on a spaceship doing deep mining activities related to the power source in this galaxy. One of them has had their arm turned to crystal through some weird exposure to metals and light, it’s not quite understood. They’re on a ship that turns out is going to self-destruct, and there’s a beautiful scene where the characters all learn this is going to happen and face death together.

That’s the chapter Paul was talking about earlier. We later go back to that same ship and see the same series of events through a different character’s eyes, a character who’s actually responsible for the ship’s destruction, and we find out why and how he got lied to. So that’s one plotline. A second plotline is the story of Jax, who’s living a hardscrabble life on a hardscrabble space station.

This is not a utopia, it’s very much a dystopian story, I think we can say, and a beautifully painted one, capitalism in space and poverty. There’s a detail you keep mentioning that I love, which is that on these mining planets there’s so much dust in the air, and the dust freezes at night when it gets cold, and it affects your lungs and everything. This character is in part living this life because he has a very rich father he’s estranged from for a number of reasons. And the father has said, “Son, I need your help, your brother’s on death row, and now they’ve scheduled his execution.

I need you to come back and help me.” We eventually learn that the father is dealing with a hostile takeover situation at his company, and the brother is caught up in that. The third storyline is from inside the brother’s perspective. The brother was attacked in an alleyway and wound up killing his attacker, but because no one can find the knife, no one really believes him.

And as you said, the criminal justice system is not exactly focused on finding the real truth of things. He’s convicted of murder and put on death row, and we see his last days through his eyes as he gets closer and closer to the execution, which turns out to be the same process we saw starting on that ship, something they now do intentionally to death row inmates, turning their full body to crystal. Jax gets to the prison too late, which I want to ask about when we get there, finds his brother’s body, and goes back to try to confront his father. He winds up instead confronting the president of the Galactic Council, and I wasn’t sure if that was more like the head of SHIELD or the head of the government, we’ll get into that in a bit. But certainly a very important person, where he learns that, as I said, it’s not Soylent Green, it’s people who are the energy source. Literally, these humans, blue.

Paul
Soylent blue, yes, that’s it, exactly.

Matthew
These crystals are able to power ships, and this is kind of almost a Mad Max-ian world in which we’ve run out of the space-travel equivalent of oil, so most space travel is deeply limited.

But with this new energy source discovered, turning literal human bodies into energy, one full cell of Ferominum, frenomia, I’m sorry, I’m never going to get it right, produces the same power. But if you don’t know how it’s pronounced either, I don’t feel bad.

Pete
It’s fine, I’ll allow it, whatever you want.

Matthew
There’s this great confrontation with both that guy and his father, some details I don’t know if we need to get into. It ends with him confronting his father about this and taking some steps. I’m trying not to spoil the very ending, but it doesn’t really matter much. He has this conversation first with the Galactic president and his father, and realizes, as you said before, these institutional systems just roll along and he can’t do anything. In the end, his father is basically waiting for death, because his father winds up killing the Galactic president, in part to save his other son, in part out of frustration with these horrible systems. Jax ends the book walking away. Here we have a character we know is going to die, but we don’t see his death on screen, and it’s not from his perspective, so we break the chain by the end.

Paul gets to be happy. So I’ve obviously just summarized what has been thirty years of your life’s work into three badly phrased minutes, but did I capture the main essence of what you were going for with the story?

Pete
Yeah, I think so. And I think the words you stumble on are precisely the words that don’t really matter. My hope is that people who read this get the sense that all the funny words are avatars for something else you can see straight through. The things I’m most interested in on a character level are like, when does refusing to abuse power become another form of abandonment? This whole relationship with his brother, I’m an only child, so a lot of this is “what would I do if I had a brother? What would I do if I had a brother in trouble?”

Can someone be guilty and still be wronged by a maladaptive system? I’m super into that question. So much of this, I opened the book with a quote which seems super pretentious, but Donella Meadows is one of my favorite people. She wrote Thinking in Systems, a book that truly impacted me, and the quote is: “System structure is the source of system behavior.” What we create as humans is how we behave as humans.

And the whole point of this story is: look, we created something that, if you really put pencil to paper, doesn’t make enough sense to be an economic foundation for space travel. But it sure does when you look at how wrongful incarceration and the death penalty will be used improperly going forward. That’s the central question to me.

What are the systems we put in place that incentivize the wrong thing? I think Jax and Leroy and Demetrios are all just vessels through which to address that bigger question, hopefully in a dark, fun way.

Matthew
One of the things we’re dealing with right now is that our prison system has figured out slave labor is useful, you can quite literally force people in prisons to generate value through their work. I love that your book turns that on its head. There are a couple of times it’s mentioned that he’s on death row, but in a way where they’ll execute him when it’s useful to them.

Paul
Yes, and it’s “life with the possibility of death,” which is such a twisted sentence.

Matthew
That’s literally what happens, they eventually figure out, oh wait, he’s worth more to us dead than alive. A couple of times you quote that he’s worth a full year’s labor, that it’s worth 250,000 credits to create the cell his body can give the equivalent fuel to.

And it’s so chilling, because the people who say it are saying it’s just numbers on paper, but it’s literally ascribing value to a human being’s life.

Paul
And it’s a planet’s year of labor, right? It’s the labor of an entire planet, not just a person.

Pete
Because look at what this one action is able to unlock in terms of economic value of transport across an entire system. There’s that question of, we’ll get your value out of you through institutionalized labor becomes we’ll get your value out of you whether you’re alive and working or not. We have ways now to unlock it.

Somebody’s LinkedIn profile says “unlocked value after death.” I came up with a system where you can see somebody being proud of that, and that just makes my stomach churn. So it had to be a part of it.

Matthew
That was my first question. One of the things I always wonder when I read or watch science fiction, I love it, but I’m always wondering about the technology further. One of my thoughts was on the death penalty side of it, once we know there’s value in a dead human being, we want to make that happen. There are other stories of a completely different variety, like Speaker for the Dead by Orson Scott Card, one of the sequels to Ender’s Game. He’s an author who’s done a lot of personal things I have problems with, but I think some of his early books are fantastic.

Some of his later ones he puts a lot of his politics into, but Speaker for the Dead I think is one of the absolute best. One of its conceits is that they go to an alien planet where, when a person is getting very near death, they kill them as part of “accepting your death.” I haven’t read the book in years, but the point is you get a dead body that you plant a tree through, because as their body decomposes it nurtures the tree: rebirth, renewal, all that stuff.

But outsiders look at it and think it’s horrible. If you told me we could take dead bodies and use them to solve an energy crisis and let people choose to do that, I don’t know if I’d say that’s a bad thing. In your world as you understand it, would people be able to volunteer for this at the time of their death? Or does it have to be while someone’s still young and healthy? Where would that fall?

Pete
It’s such a great book.

But see, you joke and you laugh, but that’s not how technology from the military-industrial complex infects us. It always starts in a massive system we have no control over, and then it trickles down into commercialization. So let’s just say, maybe not yet, but in subsequent stories it’s become part of the vernacular where they just call it “glassing.” You just get glassed at the end. So there’s this insistence that the technology moves down from this horrible thing we can’t stop, and becomes something everybody uses.

Matthew, have you heard of AI? There’s this industrial use brought about by ideologically questionable means, and suddenly, once the world gets value out of it, it becomes something we just stop questioning. That’s the system here. I didn’t mean it to be that parallel, but I didn’t have a choice, because we do it all the time. It’s just what we do as complex human organisms.

This is no different. I hope the extreme is just something that allows the point to be driven home a little more clearly.

Matthew
Very much so. I was really thinking about the running thing of Jax wondering whether he will use this energy source, and people around him wondering, and that being such a great callback. I love that you’re already considering these questions of how it would start affecting others.

That becomes a whole other series of commentary. Paul, I’ve been running over you, I want to make sure you get in here to ask some things too. But I’ve been one of the biggest proponents of allowing people to choose the time and place of their death. I believe you live in a state that’s actually legalized euthanasia, and as much as I think that’s a great thing, I also don’t ever want someone to feel coerced into it. You hear stories about perfectly well-meaning situations where the family is talking to grandma about it, and sometimes it’s brought up in obnoxious ways, sometimes just because grandma knows that if she chooses to do it now, she saves her family a huge amount of money over the next year. In a situation like this, in the glassing world, it’s like: well, grandma, we can hope this five percent chance of chemotherapy works, or you can be glassed now and send your great-grandkids to college.

Pete
I think it’s even more diabolical than that. You can imagine an entry-level sales guy coming into your house saying, “I work for JQ Mortuary, and one of the options we have now is this brand new thing, it’s called glassing, and it’s painless, and you can do it whenever you want, and maybe you should consider doing that now.” The proceeds from your glassing become part of your estate, and JQ Mortuary gets a cut. We now have economically incentivized the engine of constant death.

I just recently had a family member pass away, and the death industrial complex is a real thing. The salespeople in times of grief are taking advantage in many ways, they do it quietly and leaning forward, but that doesn’t distract from the fact that they’re taking advantage, and this becomes a part of that system.

Matthew
Going back to when you wrote this book: you and I did a whole thirteen-episode podcast on parenthood where we talked about being sons with issues with our fathers. And as everyone knows, teenage boys are the ones most likely to have perfectly healthy relationships with their parents, so I’m sure that had nothing to do with you writing this. One thing I love talking about is how people use science fiction to get people to think about issues, and I think that’s clearly part of what’s going on here. If someone had asked you the day you wrote this in high school, “what do you want someone to get out of it,” what did you want someone to think about differently in their own world after reading your book?

Pete
Matthew, that was a long time ago. That’s fair. If I were to put myself in those shoes, I think I would have said, I want my teacher, Colin Chisholm, fantastic writer in his own right, now a coach in Montana or California or something, but he was incredibly influential on me, I thought he was the coolest thing in the world. I wanted to impress Colin, I wanted to write a story that would make him say, “huh, not bad, that’s a clever twist on system stuff.” What I was thinking about at the time, if you think about when I was doing this in the late eighties, it was really clear we were already dealing with some of the symptoms of the maladapted behaviors of capitalism.

Things weren’t going great in terms of systems that masked poor behavior through economic good. I’m sure that was something I was thinking about, but I’ve spent so many hours in the words today that it’s hard to separate that.

Matthew
Let’s start talking about Jax himself. You mentioned an issue that wasn’t really on my radar, but I think you’re right, it’s a very interesting part of this. He’s a former police officer for most of the book, we’re told he was a police officer when his brother Leroy went through all this. As you mentioned, he had the ability to use his police powers to influence things, this is clearly a corrupt system, and his father, who’s made his living taking advantage of the loopholes in that corrupt system, asks him to do that. And Jax says no. Talk about that decision and what went into it.

Pete
Well, it’s a really good question, because I don’t think there’s a clean answer. As an officer who’s taken an oath to uphold the law, being asked to use his power and influence and choosing not to do so is morally defensible on his part, but it’s also emotionally catastrophic on the other. It ends up being a choice he gets to live with well beyond the pages of this story. Now that he’s outside law enforcement and investigative work, he’s reckoning with what he would have done differently if he were the guy then that he is today, because he’s a different guy as a result of that one decision. I’m fascinated by those points in people’s lives that you reach, and you don’t know it in the moment, but you know shortly after that it was foundational, a memory that’s going to change who you are. And I wonder if this was one of those for Perry.

It clearly has the echoes, but did he know in the moment he made that choice that it was going to be foundational for the future of his career, his life, how he decides things, and the methods he uses to help people going forward?

Matthew
You use incredible imagery throughout the book, I think it’s one of the best parts of your writing. There’s one moment, the word is “crystallized,” which is now such a weird word in this context, but to me it really crystallizes that whole thing, both for Jax and for his brother Leroy. At the moment the word “guilty” is read out, Jax starts to lean forward as though he’s going to stand up, but stops himself, and Leroy sees that, and Jax knows that he sees it. That was one of my favorite lines in the whole book, it so captured how, in that small thing, part of him wanted to, but he stopped himself, and Leroy saw him stop himself. Of course that’s the exact moment they’d both focus on.

Pete
When you choose oath to career over oath to family, what does that mean? What does that do to family? He just cursed his brother to a future completely out of his control, by not using what would probably have been a modicum of influence to change the course of history.

Paul
Can I un-defend Jax in this choice, this early-life choice? If he definitely believed his brother had committed murder one and disposed of the knife because it would incriminate him and make it look premeditated, I can get on board with the “not institutional loyalty” for a second. Because everything you’re saying about systems earlier, that’s why I never want to be part of a system, that’s why I’m like, don’t call me a co-host. Okay, fine, you can call me a co-host now. I’m very much Batman in the Justice League animated series, I’m only a part-timer, remember? But it’s not institutional loyalty, which is maybe what happened, but loyalty to one’s own conscience, the thought of “this is what I think I should do, I have this power, and I think this would be misusing it, so I’m not going to do it.” That’s what I think is defensible. But if he believes his brother’s story, then what’s happening in the courtroom is a miscarriage of justice, and not intervening, not trying to use his modicum of influence to change the course of events, is being complicit in a miscarriage of justice in a way. So, this being Superhero Ethics, I just wanted to throw that out there.

Pete
I love that you do that, because obviously that’s what happened. He chose not to act when all the emotional forces around him, his family, the psychosocial forces around him, were begging him to act, and he chose not to act. Now he has to live with that choice, and what did that do to him and his willingness to act in the future? He’s clearly different now. But in that moment, he was doing what he believed fervently was the right thing, or at least was being tested and chose to pass the test this way. It was a test you couldn’t actually pass, any way you pass it, you’re still cursed.

Paul
It’s the same thing, the Kobayashi Maru.

Matthew
I love that the Kobayashi Maru is the reference you go to, Paul, because to me this is literally the Batman choice. To me, the Batman choice is never that Bruce Wayne thinks he’s the only person who can do justice, but that it’s okay for him to break the rules of a corrupt system because the system is corrupt, it’s not doing what it’s supposed to be doing.

And to me, we’re so used to the Batman origin story, this is the Harvey Dent origin story. The character who’s going to keep trying to do things the right way. And I love that, as a result of breaking the oath to the family, the family then breaks his standing with the police. The family basically gets him thrown out of the police, and he’s left with nothing.

And I agree, I don’t think it’s a full defense, though I can understand it, especially given his relationship with his father. By watching someone abuse the loopholes, he can’t bring himself to do it either, but I think he’s wrong. And I love that he’s now dealing with that in all these different ways. Go ahead, Paul.

Paul
I was just going to say, it’s interesting to think his choice might have been different if he hadn’t seen his father abuse power this way all the time, with his father leaning on him, “do this for me, do this for your family.” Jax doesn’t really get the opportunity to just think, what do I really think I should do in this instance, as an individual not connected to the situation? He’s being pushed on.

Pete
His dad is the other interesting, it’s like the punchline to that ethical question. His role model is a guy whose major ethical failure is that he can tell himself any choice is justified because it serves some larger end: it’s family, it’s business, it’s survival, it’s progress, whatever it is, the ends-justify-the-means guy.

He’s kind of a caricature of that model. So when he comes to Jax and says, “I need your help,” there’s a sense that it’s a loving outreach, a fearful outreach. And yet, is familial love still love when it’s inseparable from use? He’s using his son as a means to an end again. That becomes the next question Perry has to deal with, God, I’m still dealing with this.

Matthew
There was a question I had at the end of the book I wasn’t quite sure I understood, and I think you’ve actually just helped me understand it. Part of it is that Perry at some point leaves, in part because he’s fed up with his father, but in part because he believes that if he leaves now he’ll get to the prison in time to see his brother before the execution. They’ve been told it’s thirty days.

When we go to the prison, he does get thirty days, but he’s executed before Jax gets there. I was left wondering what happened, what was the miscommunication, and whether the idea is that this was one last time where Jax put too much trust in the system.

Pete
Yeah, because they started the clock too early. All the pieces that should have gotten Jax into the queue, to be there for his brother, at least to bear witness, started way too soon, without telling him.

He trusted that family and the system were going to operate in a way he could rely on, and once again, he was failed by it.

Matthew
It’s kind of interesting, I’m very curious to see where the books go, because I can see this becoming a very dark, gumshoe, jaded-hero story. I think this could also be one hell of a villain origin story for Jax.

Pete
Oh no, that’s where you go? Oh no, this is so wrong.

Paul
Well, what do you mean, villain? That’s a hero you just described.

Pete
This story, there’s a punchline to the whole thing: what does ethical action look like when the day is truly not saveable? That’s interesting to me, and that’s kind of how the book ends. The day is not saveable, it’s very dark, and he flies off into the proverbial sunset. It’s kind of a “what are you gonna do, things happen.”

Matthew
I think that’s part of why, and I’m not going to question aesthetic choices here, Paul, I fully respect what you don’t like. But I think that’s why opening this book with the point of view of characters who die is so vital to how the book plays out, because it’s uncomfortable. There’s a part of me that always wants to know that the words I’m reading, someone had the chance to write them down. So you think, well, if this person died, how do we read this? But that’s fiction, that’s the whole point.

Paul
It’s also third person omniscient, right? It’s not first person.

Matthew
That’s very true too. But hitting us with that, because it’s not a huge convention in fiction, or at least maybe I’m not reading as much as Paul is, I kept waiting for the miracle save. I didn’t believe it, even when you got to thirty seconds left I was like, Pete, what are you doing?

How is somebody going to save them in five seconds? Okay, now I get it. I felt like that was a really effective way of starting, there’s no, this is not Waiting for Superman.

There’s no hero coming to save the day, and I think the ending would have been a lot harder to land if we hadn’t had that.

Pete
I want to respect Paul’s position, and maybe add fuel to it, because I recognize, I’ll paraphrase you Paul and you tell me if I’m wrong, that one of the things you dislike in narrative fiction is witnessing people who know they’re going to die, and then they die. Is that a fair way to put it?

Paul
Yeah, that’s basically the main thing, especially when they’re deliberately killed by another. If they’re sick and dying and they know they’re dying, that also fits the criteria, but it’s a different flavor.

Pete
So I’ll say, I wrote it and I agree with you. I find it very disquieting when that happens, especially when it becomes a narrative rug pull. It’s very much a rug pull, because you feel like you’re supposed to get to know these characters in chapter one, and by chapter two they’re all dead.

I normally respond to that poorly, and yet I felt like that was what I needed to do to set this up when I first wrote this book, and I did not change it. The only thing that changed from that opening is that chapter five, the switch of perspectives, used to be chapter two. So you had two chapters back to back watching that first crew die.

What was I thinking? Before you even meet the main character.

In any other convention, this chapter one would have been a prologue, which would tell you it’s outside the main narrative. But because I went back to it in chapter five, I felt like I had to make it part of the mainline story. I recognize that disquieting part for me, I like the reader being back on their heels a bit before they settle into who the people are they’re going to follow in chapter two. So I made that the Demetrios choice, it served a purpose.

Paul
So that convention, which you summarized pretty accurately, whatever you want to call it, that thing that happens in narrative fiction, it’s something I generally don’t enjoy. But what I do appreciate is that by making that chapter one, I know what kind of book I’m reading.

For sure. And this is kind of what Matthew was saying, I think, I wasn’t expecting Leroy to survive, I was like, no, he’s done. This isn’t a book where Jax is going to show up and rescue his brother.

It’s just not that kind of story. In the end I was like, yeah, he might just get shot in the back by the president of the Galactic Council, that’s on the table in this story. It reminds me of something Matthew said about Game of Thrones, a show I stopped watching at some point when I realized I wasn’t actually enjoying it because it has so much of specifically that kind of thing, and

Pete
all the things you hate, all the things.

Paul
In the first episode, the most relatable, heroish character kills somebody who did something fine, but he thinks he’s lying about it, so he murders him. And a brother and sister push a child out of a castle window to his apparent death, and he’s kind of okay but not totally fine. That tells you what kind of story you’re in for. So here, I definitely appreciated that. At first I was thinking, okay, and then I was like, oh no, they’re pretty sure they’re just all going to die.

And the way it’s written, it’s a bit like, did it end the countdown? Probably not. But all the lights come on, this is a social experiment.

Exactly. One of my favorite Star Wars movies is Rogue One, where going into it I just knew, they’re all going to die. That was my premise going in, and I enjoyed it a lot. If I’d gone in without that expectation, I don’t know if I’d have felt the same way.

So reading Lattice, the first chapter, I was like, oh boy, okay, we’ve got this battle, this is happening. And then his brother’s on death row, and we’re reading his chapter, and I’m like, I don’t think this is going to end well.

And there it goes. I think that was the chapter right after the one where we experience the whole crew blowing up. Also, they’ve got to stop putting self-destruct things in ships.

Pete
There’s self-destructs everywhere, why do they do it?

Paul
Why are they all over the place?

Pete
I like how I say “they,” I didn’t put it there.

Paul
They put these panels everywhere, exactly.

Matthew
I want to echo what Paul was saying about the death penalty scene. What I thought was really incredible here, and I don’t want to just praise the writing, but it’s such an interesting choice, there was never any doubt in my mind that he was going to be killed, like you said, Paul. I think that was clear. But you still managed to put an awful lot of dramatic tension in, will the brother get there on time? In my mind it wasn’t that he’d get there in time to save him, it was that he’d get there in time just to be with him, to have some kind of emotional reconnection. I love a good redemption story.

Zuko and Catra are my two favorites, from Avatar: The Last Airbender and She-Ra. But I don’t like cheap redemption. I always hate when someone’s about to die, but the person they wronged, or the person who wronged them, gets to their deathbed just in time or finds them at the battle just in time, so they can have some heart to heart. As disappointed as I was that Jax didn’t get there on time, if he had, and said, “Leroy, I’m so sorry I didn’t fight for you,” and Leroy had said it was okay, it would have felt so cheap. I really love that you didn’t give us that, that you let that be the tension, and the end result is Leroy dies never knowing why his brother didn’t come, never knowing his brother had even tried. Maybe he starts to question not fighting for him to begin with. It’s very bleak, very dark, but it felt very real, and I love that.

Pete
I’m sort of fascinated by death in general, and our experience of it, and I wanted to be with that moment. Had he been rescued, even emotionally, Jax would have sullied the moment of Leroy passing, and the moment of experiencing the machine. That was important to me, on some level, because he has his buddy on staff he’s had these moments with, and that was one of my favorite things, the thirty days chapter where you get this relationship. I really enjoyed writing that, because it was Leroy adapting to this universe where he’s probably not going to be saved, and he gets to the moment of being put into the machine. I guess I personally needed that, I needed to bear witness myself to what was in my head.

Paul
There was a therapeutic feeling to it for me, not personally, but I felt like I was experiencing what you’re describing through the writing. And through Leroy’s experience, his ultimate acceptance of what is, and then what isn’t.

Matthew
I have someone, we’ve drifted apart a bit, but a very close friend of mine from when I was in seminary, who decided it’s kind of a spiritual practice to visit an inmate on death row, and he’s continued that for many years. I want to send this to him, because I feel like this has so much to say about that whole process, a government deciding it can decide who gets to live and die, and how you walk through that. I’m curious, especially written as a high schooler, it feels like an issue you have so much insight into. Was that connected to your life at all, or did you just read a story about it somewhere? I know the eighties were around when we started, I think it was the late seventies, executions again after the Supreme Court had paused them. Not “we,” I know, Paul, America.

Paul
It was causing me physical discomfort during the words.

Matthew
To me, that’s the whole point, because my tax dollars pay for it, but anyway, the whole thing. Talk about how that issue became something you wanted to focus so much on.

Pete
I’m a Stephen King death row kid, a Green Mile, Shawshank kid, and I think you can’t help but think about the big issues when you read those stories, because Stephen King is so adept at turning big issues into tiny horrors. I directly pay great respect to those stories, The Green Mile, and stories like Dead Man Walking, all of those stories that were happening around the time I was thinking about these things are directly inspirational to how I think about death row, and it’s sort of a grand wrongness to the universe. I think the book itself is super interested in how easy it’s become for societies to make violence administratively clean. The more procedural this process is, the easier it is for each participant in the chain of violence to feel like the moral decision wasn’t theirs, that it happened somewhere else. And the distance from violence that the administrative state creates, capital punishment is massively, existentially insulting. And so…

Matthew
there’s a line from the president who says, “this isn’t execution, it’s manufacturing.” I thought that was so clear

Paul
that the even just the phrase “capital punishment,” it sanitizes. And even “death penalty,” to me, undersells it, it’s a government deciding to murder people and claiming it’s doing so for some greater good.

All the phrases people commonly use, I think, are deliberately designed to wash away the horror of it. I’m a “Ride the Lightning” kid, that’s Metallica, electricity.

Pete
That gets to part of the villainy of the story I’m so interested in. I don’t want any of the evildoing to feel mustache-twirly. This is a board meeting, all the bad happens in a procurement meeting, a court order, there are definitely facility upgrades we get to talk about.

Paul
Widening the hallways so you can push the cargo, the product, down the hall more easily. That’s so much more terrifying to me.

Matthew
The mundanity of it. Well, we’re already at an hour, and I think anyone who’s heard any of us knew that getting the three of us into a podcast was not going to lead to one of the shorter episodes of Superhero Ethics. I want to ask about one more big issue, and I want to make sure Paul gets to chime in with any last things before we wrap up. We’ve talked about father-son dynamics and the abuse of power, we’ve talked about the death penalty. Obviously another issue you’re commenting on is fuel, and what people do about it, in the world of today, but also even in the world of the late eighties. The late eighties was when the Mad Max movies were coming out, dystopian future movies about a world that’s run out of gasoline. You said you wrote this before the first Iraq war, which made it very clear, sure, it sucks that Iraq invaded a nation, Kuwait, but there were a lot of other nations that got invaded and we didn’t intervene, we intervened here because there’s oil there.

All throughout the eighties, the Iran-Iraq war, there was all sorts of talk about how important the Middle East was because it was the source of this resource the entire world needed.

As you’ve set it up, it’s almost more of a Mad Max world, they’ve run out of fuel and the galaxy is suffering because of it. Talk about how you saw that, what you wanted to say about the things people, everyone except Paul, will do to deal with a lack of fuel.

Pete
I admit the economic reality was second to the humor I found in a lack of fuel at a galactic, universal scale. I couldn’t help imagining these transport ships running out of gas, and how much it sucks to run out of gas in space.

I thought that was legitimately funny at first, and then, of course, you’re right. It was the eighties, I learned what “embargo” meant. To me, going back to the Donella Meadows quote, the system that’s unlocked through violence is more important. The fact that they now have a way to answer a fuel crisis with autonomy is really important. Whatever party’s in power, they now have a choice in how to manage their fuel crisis, and it doesn’t involve anyone else, it doesn’t involve invading other planets, or countries.

They can just do it. It’s amazing, incredibly powerful, incredibly efficient, and we don’t need to think about how we got it, because it’s ours, we own it, we discovered it. We can unlock untold economic potential because of a thing we invented.

There’s this quote, I unfortunately watch a lot of The Daily Show, and the quotes they’re pulling right now, this week, about how they’d never have been able to invent the wheel were it not for America, those kinds of things.

That’s exactly the model I’m thinking about when I think about agency in economic futures. It’s ridiculous, we’re ridiculous, and the fact that those systems stand so heavily on the shoulders of so many others and then ignore that, that’s the crisis.

Matthew
It’s funny that part of what you say is the autonomy of not having to invade anywhere else because you can get all the fuel from your own citizens. Of course, the first thing that occurs to me is, the minute the citizens get mad, you say, all right, let’s get it from someone else’s citizens. Now we’re back to conquering someone, so you can give them all the death penalty too.

Pete
Another parallel I have to recognize is Cory Doctorow, and his book Enshittification, not even his latest, the guy is so incredibly prolific, documenting what happens to platforms over time as they increase power and agency over their users. I’m thinking about that model when I think about what happens when corporations and corporate governance allow us to take our users and turn them into fuel for economic gain.

Paul
Yeah, that’s basically how social media platforms function, right?

Pete
That’s exactly how social media platforms function.

Matthew
Exactly, they give you a system you never knew you needed. They give it to you relatively cost free, there’s no advertising at first, no spam, they’re doing a pretty good job of filtering out hate speech and harassment. And then they literally start upping the price, but also upping the enshittification, the terribleness of more spam bots, more ads, more hate speech. And you’re like, but I can’t let go of it.

I need this product, and five or ten years ago we’d never even heard of it. In the same way, none of us today are like, “I need space travel, I need to go to all these planets,” except for rich billionaires. It’d be nice, eventually, to get beyond Earth, but we don’t need it. But the idea that you’d get so used to all this interstellar or interplanetary travel, and then someone says, well, we know now, you have to kill people for it.

Paul
It’s like if you live in Manhattan without a car, you’re like, I don’t need a car. And then you move somewhere else to get a car, and you’re like, ah, I could never live without a car.

Pete
Exactly, that’s exactly right. I rented a car for a weekend in Manhattan, and suddenly I’m thinking I’d better look for a permanent parking space.

Paul
Yeah, I could never live without a car, I’ll just spend an hour looking for a spot.

Matthew
I grew up in Manhattan, and I was very proud of the fact that I didn’t really get a driver’s license. I got one when I was eighteen, barely used it, had to get one again when I was like twenty-six because it just was never a thing for me. Then I moved back to New York and intentionally found a place where I could get easy parking, far enough out in Brooklyn. Now I live in a house that’s maybe five times the space of the New York apartment where I grew up. And plenty of parking.

Pete
You could park several cars in and around your house.

Matthew
And it’s still cheaper than the parking lot.

Paul
Right, sure, sure, all right.

Matthew
Well, Paul, I want us to start wrapping up. What are the last things you want to ask about, either the story itself, the ethics, or the writing?

Paul
Let’s see, I think I asked my main writing questions. In terms of other stories, you were talking about having this backlog of things you’ve worked on over the years, very relatable, by the way. Do you have a bunch of other stories in the pipeline, coming soon? I think there’s one that’s already available too.

Pete
So, Lattice, I released it, and not that anybody’s interested, but just my thinking: Lattice was very much an experiment for me, to see if I could go through the whole process, get enough feedback from beta readers, get a line editor, and do the work to actually make it a book. And take advantage of the fact that I live in a time where there are no gatekeepers to getting books on shelves. That’s extremely exciting, and I feel incredibly blessed to be here now. So I did it with Lattice.

I feel like I was very lucky to be able to do that. Since then I’ve released my first full-length novel, called Onset. It’s the first book in a trilogy, a YA dark thriller crossover, guess what, about kids growing up in the foster system who have some potentially unique abilities. And guess what?

Whenever kids show adults something beautiful, adults turn it into something dark, that’s what Onset is about. It’s my first full-length novel, and so far it’s getting some pretty good feedback, I’m really excited to have it out there. I wrote Onset for my kids when they were about nine and thirteen, so that was ten years ago. It’s a story for them, about them, and they loved it, so I thought I’d share it more broadly. That’s out now. The next Jax book is going to be out in a couple of months, it stays in the same universe, but it moves the ethical question forward, I think.

If Lattice is about hidden horror becoming visible at the systems level, Rollback is very much about what happens when that horror becomes our infrastructure. It’s another season of Jax.

I’m very excited about that, this is the era of releasing old creative works. Jump in, Paul, the water’s very warm. Go ahead, Paul.

Paul
I have some things I think I’ll put on my website, a package of, I did something similar to what you did maybe ten or twelve years ago, where I took something I’d written when I was twenty or twenty-one and reimagined it as a fairly different story, with a lot of the same scenes and basic characters, and turned it into a novelette. But I haven’t published anything for fiction in the last decade or so. Reading this and talking to you has definitely increased my appetite for both digging up older things and actually writing some of the stories I have percolating in my mind.

Matthew
I’m really glad both of you are doing that, I’ve loved both of your writing. I’m hoping my book on villains will eventually come out, I’ve been talking about it for five years now.

We’ll see if it actually does. I want to reiterate, you can find both Paul and Pete’s work in the links in the show notes. This is definitely true with Paul, if you follow the specific link in the show notes, you’ll not only get the book at a discount, but a little bit of that money comes back to us running this podcast. A little of that money goes to Paul, if Pete and I are able,

Paul
and none of it goes to Yacht Fuel.

Matthew
Yes, there’ll be no Basil Box associated with that, Yacht Fuel, that’s Pete’s version. If we’re able to set that up, there’ll definitely be a link where Pete gets most of the money. We made an affiliate link so a little bit of the money comes to this podcast because we helped promote it.

Pete
Definitely click the links in the show notes, those will be the Superhero Ethics affiliate links, and give Matthew and Paul their cut, please.

Matthew
And some goes back to Pete too. Yeah, it’ll all work out.

Paul
It’s a win-win win.

Matthew
Everyone wins. And none of it is Bezos Bucks, unless you really want to get it from Amazon, in which case we’ll get like two cents of Bezos Bucks. But however you want to do it, get the show notes, get all the links in the show notes.

You can also find links to my other podcast, Star Wars Generations, where we’re going to be talking about the ninth Jedi coming out soon. We did a whole series on Maul: Shadow Lord over on that show, which was really exciting. If you go back earlier in this podcast, if you like private investigators and worlds a little different from our own, Spider-Noir was a great show, and we had a great time talking about it with Will Freeland, who’s done a lot of work with us on Spider-Man and other Marvel stuff. Please check all those out, check out The Marvel Movie Minute that Pete and I are on, Paul’s been a guest on a couple of times. Check out all the other podcasts at TruStory FM. And most importantly, we have

Paul
you run out of fuel in deep space? Do you have an expendable crew member? Why not turn them into fuel, for the low price of, I don’t know how much these things cost, but I was just trying to write some ad copy for a glassing service.