The Cosmic Color

"I love The Cosmic Color . It is a novella from Neon Hemlock, which also happens to be my publisher for The Dragonfly Gambit . I describe it as the Gundam book that I wanted to write, but didn’t have the chops to write. The premise is that Earth soldiers are integrating with these giant semi-organic, semi-mechanical suits to fight alien-like monsters of an unknown origin. We’re following one of the pilots as he’s graduating from the training of being in this giant mecha suit, and how this maps out across our protagonist’s own gender identity; the embodied experience of being inside this giant mecha suit, versus the embodied experience of being in his male body. The Cosmic Colour also gets at military propaganda, and how there’s a very specific way that it’s always framed – the sort of people that appear on military posters, and the ways in which they appear on them. I adore novellas from a pragmatic sense, because they are a quick read. It’s not an investment like a 150k-word book. But also, what makes a novella different is that you can have a very high-intensity, compressed experience of a single storyline. It’s very difficult to have several storylines within a novella and do them justice, so as an author, you tend to focus on one big plot. Maybe there is one subplot that you’re weaving through, but all of your attention is on that one plot. I like to say that when you’re writing a novel, you need to justify each scene: Is the scene integral? If it’s not, goodbye. With a novella, you’re fighting for each paragraph, sometimes each sentence. You’re so much more deliberate with your words, with how you’re putting information down for your readers. They’re super fun and sometimes very frustrating to write because of this. I think the best prose, the best narration comes out of novellas, because you have this constraint, and it forces you to get creative about the way that you’re telling your story. The Dragonfly Gambit is a story about a pilot who has a career-ending injury that causes her to leave the military. A decade afterwards, she gets dragged in for a different purpose – but now with plans to destroy the fleet that she was once flying for. A lot of people like to say that it’s a story about revenge. It is, to an extent. But this was my attempt at military sci fi that was critical of the military-industrial complex. I also really wanted to play with the idea of ‘every character sucks here.’ Everyone has a few redeeming qualities, but everybody is also kind of terrible in their own way. At the same time, because I’m working within this constraint, every character is there to illuminate and prop up a theme. It was fun to use my characters to have these conversations in a thematic sense. It was originally supposed to be a Gundam story – A Gundam is a giant mecha suit, and it comes out of Japanese animation and manga. I watched a lot of mecha anime, so I wanted to write something that had a conversation with that media, but it required so much engineering knowledge that I simply did not have. Yes, I wanted to play with the idea of the other side of military propaganda: how do people come out on the other end? If there is an other end. If this is the framing and the messaging that they have been exposed to their entire lives, and if they are aware that those are their constraints… How do they survive in these very narrow constraints, when they know that they are disposable? When they know that there is nothing to return to, nobody is waiting for them; when their entire life is part of a system that they realise is incredibly corrupted and incredibly broken, but there’s no other option. That paints a very bleak story, in a way, but I also think it adds to the characterization. People do very questionable, rash, almost counterintuitive things because they always feel their back is against the wall. The attitude of ‘burn everything to the ground’ comes from that. Dragonfly was an experiment: how far can I push these fictional people?"