(Interviewed by Caroline Stickel and Merlin Blanchard, Social Media Director and Assistant of Leading Edge Magazine)
A few weeks ago, we chatted over Zoom with Dan Wells, a BYU grad and Leading Edge alum who has gone on to write the bestselling John Wayne Cleaver series, the Partials sequence, the Mirador series, and a number of standalone novels, including The Hollow City and Extreme Makeover: Apocalypse Edition. Here’s part three of our three-part series!
Missed Part One? Read it here.
Missed Part Two? Read it here.
Caroline Stickel: You served a Spanish-speaking LDS mission, right?
Dan Wells: Yes! I served in northern Mexico, which has helped a lot. When I go there, I don’t need a translator. I can do TV shows, and I can do radio appearances, and I can do interviews in front of audiences. I’ve been able to keep up my Spanish; my Spanish is actually better than it was on my mission, because I’ve had to keep it up for professional reasons. It’s been really great. Actually, Brandon’s wife served a mission in Bolivia. So our grand plan is, once one of these collaborations finally comes out, we’re going to do a joint tour down there of a couple of places. That’ll be wonderful. We’ve been planning that for years, so who knows if that’ll happen, but we hope it eventually does!
CS: I served a mission speaking Spanish in Los Angeles, so when I learned about your Mirador series, which is set in Los Angeles in 2050, I had to get my hands on it. Which of those books was your favorite to write, and which scene in that series was your favorite to write?
DW: Oh, man. That’s so hard! They were a lot of fun. That is a series that I could write forever. HarperCollins didn’t really know what to do with it; the third book did not get promoted or sell well. But, in my secret heart of hearts, what I would like my career to be is putting out other books, and then a new Cherry Dogs book every year that no one will read but you and me. And that’s fine with me.
It’s actually really cool that living in LA that is what got you into the series, because I was writing for that audience—and it never really took off with the Mexican-American reader in the way that I hoped that it would. But in Mexico, that series was huge. And in hindsight, it’s fairly obvious that I don’t have a ton of personal experience with Mexican-American culture; it’s all Mexican culture. So I think it rang much more true with the Mexican audience. They read it, and they loved it, and like I said, I get recognized on the street when I go to Mexico. But in the states, it never really got picked up by those readers. I did poor research, and I was portraying the wrong culture I think.
So, what’s my favorite scene? I really love, in the second book [Ones and Zeroes], the scene where they escape the high rise on drones. I’ve always loved that. The second book is probably my favorite just in general, because there’s so many great things about it. But there is a scene in the third book where they figure out why there are so many hands, and they go to a guy’s house, and it turns out he’s got a bioprinter that’s broken, and it’s just cranking out left hands ad nauseum. And I love it. I love that scene because it’s so funny and gross at the same time.
I specifically wrote those books so that they would be episodic, rather than serialized. You could pick up any of those three books and read it without knowing what happened in the other ones. You don’t have to read them in order. So Ones and Zeroes is the one I usually point people to. Bluescreen is the book that taught me how to write those characters, but Ones and Zeroes and Active Memory are such better books.
CS: In that world of Los Angeles in 2050, where do you think you would fit in? Would you be an Overworld player? A hacker? A gang member? A chef at a Mexican-Asian fusion place? Or would you just play Salad Bowl casually?
DW: I love that you called out Salad Bowl, because that’s also one of my favorite parts of those books. What does the casual mobile game look like in a virtual reality world? Well, you just screw around, collating salad.
Merlin Blanchard: Now I’m really sad I stopped reading Bluescreen at the scene when the gang members come in and threaten Marisa’s family. It freaked me out so much, I put the book down. I thought of how the police couldn’t help her, and it really frightened me.
DW: Well, it’s scary! But I’m glad that scene was effective. I think I’m thinking of the right scene; that was one of the times when I’d completely written myself into a hole, and I had no way to get her out of that situation. So I went back, but I didn’t want to have to rewrite all of that stuff, because it’s good stuff. It’s powerful and it’s frightening, and I didn’t want to have to change it. I thought, How can this girl, who doesn’t actually have any combat skills or any resources to draw on, how can she—as purely just a hacker—save her family and get rid of these gang members? And then I came up with the idea of hacking their vision, their cybernetic eyes, so that they just get endless pop-ups and can’t see anything. That delighted me, to be able to stumble onto that. And it wasn’t in the outline; it was just pure desperation.
The third book as well: one of my favorite parts of that one is when she goes off the grid, and she’s trying to find her brother, who’s one of the gang members who are now kind of hiding because there’s bigger and scarier people. So she has to go to them and make a deal with the devil, so to speak, to get their help. And they live in an underground parking garage that was never completed, and that was abandoned. First of all, LA is full of that kind of stuff. I mean, right now, Salt Lake is full of semi-completed construction projects as well. There’s something about that: that there’s this full-on post-apocalyptic society living in the middle of this incredibly advanced, high-tech culture and civilization. I love it cause it sounds crazy, but there are absolutely portions of big cities today that are like that. Big chunks of Detroit are like that. Big chunks of LA today are like that. Not necessarily that there’s communities living underground, but there’s communities living in shanty towns in the middle of or next to big cities that we have.
In the second book, Ones and Zeroes, they go out hunting drones. And I was thinking that a future in which drones do all our delivery work is absolutely going to devolve in piracy, because people are going to attack them to get their stuff. And then a few weeks ago there was news all over about automated trains in LA that were getting hit, and people were getting all the Amazon packages off of them. There were photos coming out of thousands of packages strewn across the ground because people would take what they wanted. I love it when stuff we come up with in science fiction becomes real. Sometimes it’s the cool stuff, like voice-activated computers from Star Trek. And sometimes, it’s the scary stuff like people misappropriating technology and using it for their own ends. I just find that wonderful, when a science fiction author puts in the work and get it right. And this is a case where that was obvious. It was not hard for me to say that “people are going to start robbing Amazon delivery drones.” Of course they’re going to. But it still is this little frizzone of excitement to realize that “Yes!” I predicted this six years ago, now it’s happening. I win.
MB: There was a non-fiction article in our last edition that talked about how science fiction used to predict all the advancements we were going to have, but that, in some sense, Dystopia has replaced that with, “Oh, look at all the terrible stuff that’s going to happen,” to help us wrap our minds around how things are changing. That kind of connects with this theme of trying to figure out how to navigate with the evolving world.
DW: Well, yes and no. The great thing is that dystopias are basically gone now. They’ll occasionally show up, and that’s what science fiction was ten years ago. That’s not what it is anymore. I remember when The Martian came out, and I thought, “This is exactly what society is hungry for. A bunch of people all over the world get together to use science to solve a problem.” It was basically the new Star Trek. I don’t think it’s any accident that in the wake of The Martian we now have five Star Trek series in active production. People are very hungry for upbeat stories about solving problems rather than slogging through the horror.
And who knows where that’s going to go now. There hasn’t been a single world event as disruptive to our storytelling culture as COVID, because how do you tell a story about this world? Where do you set it? Most of our television is just ignoring it completely. There are maybe one or two sitcoms showing people wearing masks, and everyone else is like, “Oh, we’re pretending that it’s over now.” And we’re still not over it, two years later. My author friends and I had so many conversations over the summer of 2020 saying, “Well, what do we do? Do we write stories that take place during the pandemic, during the lockdown, because that’s what we’re in the middle of? How long are we going to be in the middle of it? At what point will we look back on this? With this pandemic and the efforts we’ve taken to contain it, will we tell our children about those two crazy years? Or will we talk about it as the first year, and that it’s never ended?” And we still don’t know.
And now there’s a war going on, among all these other things, and the future is increasingly impossible to predict. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to write stories set in the present day, let alone in the future, because we don’t know what tomorrow is going to look like. But at the same time, that’s kind of a problem that’s been around forever. You look at the timeline of Star Trek, and World War III started in 2004, or something ridiculous. We’ve already passed the future of Back to the Future, where there are flying cars and fusion reactors everywhere. Every attempt to predict the future is wrong. It’s less about trying to be right (as much as I thrill about attacking drones) than it is about saying something valuable, that people find compelling and helpful, useful, or simply entertaining.
MB: I heard you played Guild Wars 2, and was wondering what your favorite race and profession are, since you’ve mentioned before that you’ll level characters to 80 and then delete them.
DW: Oh, I delete characters because it takes in-games purchases to buy extra character slots. I only have the six or seven character slots that came with the game. I think it’s important to point out that I love Guild Wars 2, but I don’t love the storytelling in Guild Wars 2. I just bought the new expansion End of Dragons, and absolutely love all the new class specialties and the regions. The art is awesome, and I’m excited to unlock all the new little gaming elements like jade technology and the new movement systems they’ve put together. But, I’m mostly ignoring the story. It’s not bad, but it’s just not for me, and hasn’t really clicked with me in any way.
The first character that got me into the game and really made me fall in love with it was the Thief, and I had a little Asura guy who was one. I don’t find a lot of difference between the races. They don’t play differently. They’ve got a couple of special racial superpowers that no one ever uses because they’re not exciting or useful. It’s more for me about the [race-specific] cultural armor. If I plan a new character, I’ll think, “Well what do I want them to look like? Is there a cultural armor set that fits with this mental image?” and that’s why I’ll choose a race. Other than that they’re all indistinguishable to me. It all comes down to the class itself. In playing End of Dragons right now, I’m really loving the the Bladesworn class. Basically they went all in on anime swordsmen. It feels very anime swordsmaster to be running around with it.
MB: Bladesworn is a Warrior subclass—do they use a greatsword?
DW: No—it’s weird, actually, they use a sword and a gun, because they have an off-hand gun. Then you push a button and it changes the model so you have this bit two handed sword with a revolver barrel on it, like in Final Fantasy VIII. So it’s a gunsaber. But there aren’t actually gunsaber items you collect, it’s just a gun and a sword and then you combine them when you use one of your powers. It’s weird. But it’s a lot of fun, and I’m enjoying it.
MB: Have you been following the controversy with one of the final areas?
DW: Oh yeah! The fact that they’ve been putting the final thing as a world meta instead of an instanced event, that apparently has a lot of people up in arms. I haven’t gotten there yet, so I don’t know. But as I said, the storytelling style that the game has used from the beginning doesn’t really jive with me, so I don’t tend to do boss battles, raids, and things like that, since it’s not why I play the game. So, I really don’t know. I liked some of their world boss fights, like the Sunless in the south and some others, so this one sounds exciting, and the fact that it’s a world meta means that I’ll try it at some point, whereas if it were an instance I probably never would. The fact that it’s a meta event that takes hours and hours to complete is ridiculous. I mean, I’m sure there are people who love that. But nah, not for me. I’ve got stuff to do. I don’t have that many hours into collecting widgets so we can eventually kill the monster. Just give me a monster fight and we’re done.
MB: Yeah, I’ve been hearing it takes about two hours to complete, but it’s a raid level difficulty. I heard some commentary that there’s a turtle mount that’s locked behind the event, which ArenaNet might create an alternate way to get, instead of having to sink in 20 to 30 hours without any rewards.
DW: Yeah, and that’s the problem. Apparently the reason it’s controversial is that if you inexperienced players participating it make it instead of easier. And, so the fact that it’s a world meta means that knuckleheads like me are going to stumble into the middle of it and do something and ruin it for everyone else. But, I just don’t participate in the story missions, and I never have to worry about it.
MB: You mentioned having a Patreon and Writing Classes. Are those two associated with each other?
DW: The Patreon is an online writing group that at the end of last year I was thinking of setting it free and let it be its own thing, but I’ve decided I’m going to keep myself involved with it. The writing classes, beyond that, are mostly through Writing Excuses and other conventions. Writing Excuses has two events that have not been announced yet, but will be announced in the next week or two. We have our big retreat in September on a cruise ship. We also have our retreat in Utah at Capitol Reef at the end of June. We do our best to keep those really affordable. Really affordable meaning it’s still about $1,400 to do the Capitol Reef one. But, you’re not going to find another week-long writing conference that includes room and board for that or less than that. We try to make them as accessible as we can.
A big thanks to Dan and Dawn Wells for the interview and the continued support of Leading Edge Magazine!