Dystopian Cyberpunk and Asian High Fantasy: An interview with Camille Picott

1) Tell us about your book. 

Sulan is a near-future YA book that’s a blend of dystopia and cyberpunk (which I call dystopunk). It stars a Chinese heroine. There aren’t a lot of Asian heroes and heroines in YA lit right now. I wanted to create an Asian heroine kids and teens could admire. 

2) Dystopia is popular right now, but very few dystopia stories have a sovereign default as their precipitating event. Were you at all influenced by recent economic turmoil is setting that background for the book? 

I was definitely influenced by current trends when creating the backdrop for Sulan. I took current events—climate change, global economic turmoil, simmering conflict with North Korea, and the growing power of China—and extrapolated them ten-fold.

3) Tell us about your lead, Sulan

Sulan is a math prodigy who feels pigeon-holed by her gift. The adults in her world all expect Sualn’s life to take a certain path. Sulan resents this and struggles against it. I think a lot of teens struggle against adult expectations. I know I did.

What Sulan really loves is sparring and learning to defend herself. Though she’s not gifted in this area like she is with math, she finds happiness when she’s sparring. Hard work and dedication go a long way to enhance her skill set. She enjoys working hard for something she’s passionate about, as opposed to excelling at something that comes easy to her.

4) How did you approach world-building? Was it more about extrapolating from existing tech or more about highlighting certain techs to enhance your story?

I definitely extrapolated on existing tech. I wanted to create a near-future dystopian setting—one that readers could imagine being our reality in the next 10 – 20 years. (As opposed to a dystopian setting that exists several hundred years in the future.) I expect to see virtual reality as mainstream technology within my lifetime, so it seemed natural to include that.

5) What are the primary themes your book explores?

I covered a lot of themes in the questions above, but one I haven’t talked about yet is the corporate theme in my book. Corporate lobbyists hold a lot of power in our current political system. I was interested in exploring what might happen if corporations and the individuals who lead/own them gained an even larger share of power and control in our country. Again, I took a current trend and extrapolated ten-fold.

6) How do you feel writing young adult books is different than adult books? Is just about age or do you feel there should be a thematic focus difference?

This is a great question! I actually wrote a blog post addressing this very issue. You can read the entire piece here. In summary, here’s what I see as the main differences between YA and adult.

1. Themes and situations. The themes found in Adult vs YA are a vastly different. Examples of themes I've found in adult books: Dating with kids. Work-life-balance. The joys and struggles of maintaining a long term relationship. Parent-child relationships from the parent's POV. Examples of YA themes I've seen: Conflicts with friends. Love angst. Friendship angst. School conflicts. Parent conflicts (from the teen's POV). Coming of age.

2. Pacing. I think adult novels often have a slower pace. Not always, but I definitely think authors can get away with a methodical pace in an adult novel. YA, on the other hand, tends to be very fast-paced—one of the things I personally love about it.

3. Length. It's not very often I see a 700 page YA novel. I see them quite a bit in the adult section. I think long YA books are, in general, shorter.

4. Age of the Protagonists. This is sometimes a good indicator of where a book should be shelved, but not always. One example I can think of is Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson. One of the main characters is sixteen at the start of the series, but the series is definitely written for adults. The characters, even the young ones, are all very adult with adult problem. So I don't think protagonist age should be the only thing taken into consideration when calculating the target audience for a novel.

7) Please tell us about some of your other projects.

My current project is an adult book entitled The Warrior & The Flower. It’s a high fantasy in an Asian-inspired setting. I’m aiming to have it out in December. Here’s the synopsis:

Yi, a retired soldier, has lost everything he loves—his wife, his daughter, and his home. With nothing left to live for, he focuses on serving the aging World Emperor. His duty is to transport precious liquid steel arrowheads to the imperial army. Unfortunately for Yi, the cloud shamans—lightning-wielding warriors of the Sky Kingdom—seek the precious commodity as well.

Tulip, the young child of a prostitute, constantly draws the ire of the house madam with her irrepressible curiosity. An impulsive stunt results in a wrathful beating from the madam.

Yi, fleeing from pursuing cloud shamans, witnesses Tulip’s beating. Drawn by the child’s striking resemblance to his own lost daughter, he impulsively negotiates for her purchase—after all, how hard can it be to care for one little girl?

But with Tulip’s inquisitive and precocious nature, he gets more than he bargained for. With the cloud shamans on his heels, Yi must confront his own grief and learn to be a father all over again.

8) Do you have an excerpt you'd like to share?

Sure! Here’s a scene from Chapter 1 of The Warrior & The Flower. (It’s still a working draft, so please excuse anything that seems rough at this point.)

Jen Yi resisted the urge to whistle as he rode. Just because he was less than an hour’s ride from home did not give him an excuse to be a fool. Whistling could attract attention of a menghai, the spiky bovine-like creatures that stalked this area of the mountains.

Sweet little Jian would be terrified if her papa arrived home covered in quills and bleeding from a tumble with a menghai. Sei, on the other hand, would be overjoyed to have menghai quills for her embroidery work, even if she did have to pull them from her husband’s backside. Of course, she would not be pleased if the beast managed to kill him. Damnable menghai could be harder to kill than cloud shamans. The last time he’d come up against a menghai—

Beneath him, Fire Foot hissed and shied sideways.

Yi snapped out of his reverie. He drew his sword, scanning the evergreen forest on either side of the road. He was a fool to let himself daydream in menghai territory. 

“What is it?” he asked his kylin, pressing one hand to the beast’s scaled flank.

Fire Foot snorted and hissed again, his forked tongue flicking out to taste the air. His ears pricked forward beneath a bushy red-and-gold mane. He flared his nostrils, pausing to paw at the ground with a cloven hoof.

Yi inhaled deeply. Fire Foot carried him forward another hundred yards before he caught the scent. Smoke. The smell of burning was faint yet discernible. 

The forest was tall and thick on this section of the road. Yi had little visibility beyond the trees on either side of him and the ribbon of blue sky overhead. He leaned forward, urging Fire Foot toward a rise in the road. From there, he would be able to see more of the land.

Fire Foot broke into a canter, red-and-gold scales rippling beneath the afternoon sun. As they crested the rise, Yi saw a thick column of smoke churning up from the northwest—from a small village comprised of tidy pine cottages.

It was Fen-li. His village. And it was burning. Smoke obscured most of the houses and shops from sight, but great gouts of orange flame licked at the clear sky.

“Sei,” he whispered. “Jian.” He jammed his boot heels hard into Fire Foot.

The kylin shrieked and bolted forward, galloping down the road and toward the village. Yi leaned low over him, wrapping his free hand in the mane.

How could there be a fire in Fen-li? The earth was still wet from the spring snow melts. Even when the elders did burn fields, they were careful and never burned this early in the season.

A shadow flickered above him. It blotted out the light for a fraction of a second. Had Yi not spent fifteen years of his life as a soldier, he likely wouldn’t have noticed it. But in that split second, Yi knew exactly how the fire had started. More specifically, he knew who had started it: the cloud shamans.

They can’t be this far east. They can’t be.

But they were.

Looking up, Yi saw a lone cloud shaman bank sharply on his cloud. Dressed in the tight-fitting brown leathers of the Sky Kingdom, the shaman rode the cloud with his knees slightly bent. As he spun the cloud around to charge at Yi, there were several heartbeats when his body was parallel with the ground.

Yi jammed his sword into his sheath and pulled out his bow. The cloud shaman raised his hands, honey jade bracelets winking pale yellow beneath the sun. Silver chains connected the bracelet to honey jade rings on his fingers. The stone jewelry glowed, the honeycomb interior charged with lightning harvested in the Sky Kingdom.

Fire Foot screamed at the sight of the bracelets, his mane fluffing with anticipation. The kylin craved lightning the way Jian craved sweets. Even from this distance, Fire Foot smelled it. He reared and pranced, straining in its direction.

In that instant, the cloud shaman hesitated. If he fired at Yi, he risked hitting Fire Foot instead—and a lightning-charged kylin was dangerous, even more dangerous than Yi. A kylin in a lightning frenzy was deadly.

That hesitation was all Yi needed. He snatched an arrow from his quiver. It was tipped with a liquid steel arrowhead, the only metal in the Three Kingdoms that could obliterate a shaman’s cloud.

In one smooth notion, he drew and fired. The first arrow barely left his bow before he fired a second one. Both shot forward in whistling arcs.

In his youth, he’d been the best archer in Emperor Chun’s army. Even in retirement, his shots flew true. There was the solid thunk of one arrow hitting flesh, and the telltale hiss as the other pierced the cloud and turned it to insubstantial mist.

The shaman cried out as he plummeted earthward. As he fell, he raised one bracelet and fired. Yi was blinded as lightning blazed forth from the honey jade, flashing straight for him.

He threw himself against the kylin’s neck for protection. Fire Foot reared and hissed with excitement, his body guided by his instinct. Yi felt the kylin take the strike square in the chest. It reverberated through Fire Foot’s body like a gong, sending out shockwaves that made the beast quiver in response.

Fire Foot shrilled in ecstasy. Yi opened his eyes to see the lightning crackling across his scales. It quickly disappeared, absorbed by the kylin’s body. The beast glowed red-gold. His eyes emitted a white-hot light, and even his dark gold antlers glowed.

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Sulan: Episode One: The League is now available in physical, ebook, and  audio book format at Amazon.

Please visit the author at http://www.camillepicott.com/.

National Bankruptcy, Climate Change, and Anti-American Terrorists in the Future: A Review of Sulan by Camille Picott

In Camille Picott's Sulan, Episode 1: The League the United States has been reduced to a weakened former shell of itself. A sovereign default, compounding the effects of advanced climate change that has reduced agricultural viability in North America, has left the country poor and scrambling to provide the most basic of services. Famine and refugees camps are common. If that wasn't enough, a terrorist group, the Anti-American League, is waging a bombing and assassination campaign against anyone they deem useful to the country, including innocent college kids. The most powerful entities in this new power structures are multi-national corporations jockeying for position as they work on producing everything from weapons to programs for virtual reality.

Teenage math prodigy Sulan Hom is somewhat shielded from these harsh realities. Her parents are important employees in one of the more powerful corporations. She attends virtual reality school. In such an unstable world, though, no one is truly safe.

There's a lot to like about Sulan. The near-future science fiction setting provides a lot of cool toys and ideas that still come off as rather plausible. I don't want to spoil the book, so I'll note I particularly liked a few things they did with genetic engineering.

The main character herself is likable and proactive, even if she's a bit understandably sheltered at the beginning. Interestingly enough, I'll even note she comes off naive early on, despite the fact her witnessing a terrorist broadcast of a college execution ostensibly is a chief motivating factor for her to start wanting to learn to protect herself. That said, when we're first introduced to her, it's obvious that her issues, despite the horror around her, are really more about more typical adolescent struggles to define themselves and assert some control in a time of responsibility and transition. That said, she doesn't really come off as self-centered, an interesting feat in a book centered around a 16-year-old genius girl living in conditions well superior to many people in the setting. One of my particular bugbears in YA fiction centered around female leads are non-proactive heroines, and Sulan Hom is a character that is doing everything she can to influence her situation.

The primary side characters, her friends, are likable enough. Similar to Sulan, they all a solid combination of teens with believable teen issues and desires who are a just a bit more impressive than your average teen. This is, though, to be expected. By the nature of the setting, these characters represent the children of the elites.


The primary antagonists of the book, the Anti-American League, don't get as perhaps as much depth as probably needed. They certainly come off sinister and present a credible threat, but as presented, generate more than a few questions about the actual plausible nature of the terrorist group represented. Additional geopolitical context perhaps would have benefited our understanding of their League, their goals, and their strategies, and, as such, made them come off as a slightly more realistic, and therefore menacing, terrorist group. It also may be that some of these questions are answered in sequels.


Though the plot overall is brisk, it initially lingers a bit slightly too long on Sulan training in virtual reality. Despite some setting elements introduced to make it clear she's not totally safe even there, it still dampens some of the tension. The second and third acts, though, move along at a solid clip that is exciting without seeming too rushed, despite the relatively short length of the book. There are several nice action scenes combined with more than a few times where the characters have to try and think their way out of a predicament. At the same time, the plot provides plenty of mystery for sequels but still tells a complete and satisfying story arc.

Please stop by tomorrow to read an interview with the author.

Sulan: Episode One: The League is now available in physical, ebook, and  audio book format at Amazon.

Cyberpunk in a Fedora: An interview with Suzanne Van Rooyen

Today I'm talking with Suzanne Van Rooyen about her dystopian tech-noir, Dragon's Teeth.

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1) Tell us about your book.

Well, in a nutshell Dragon's Teeth could be classified as dystopian tech-noir. Decoding the genre tags, what that means is that the world has suffered an apocalyptic event that leaves pockets of humanity run by a variety of governments. My story concentrates on two: the cybernetic playground of New Arcadia and the theocratic nameless city. Although the tie between these two cities across a divide of almost half a century isn't immediately apparent, the individual characters from each era are in fact tied closely together. You can expect genetic engineering, cybernetics, indoctrinated soldiers, a seedy city underbelly, government conspiracies and an ever so suave detective, replete in fedora and trench-coat, who ties the whole story together.

2) How did you approach your world-building process?

This really happened in two stages. First, the bleak Scandinavian setting for the nameless city and then the over-the-top playground like setting for New Arcadia. I tried to make the two polar opposites of each other. For New Arcadia, I just let my imagination run wild, conjuring setting according to my character. I definitely tried to build the individual worlds around my main characters - what would they want, need, love and despise in the world? And so the scenes were born. I had a better idea of what my nameless city would be like from before I started writing. New Arcadia, however, developed along with my characters.

3) Tell us about your lead, Cyrus.

Cyrus is complex in that what you see is definitely not what you get. He's got a dark and violent past that he tries to bury, tries to hide beneath his 1940s veneer. He's not the typical hero and certainly doesn't play by the rules, but he has integrity and lives by his own honour code.

4) What made you decide to combine a somewhat classic detective archetype with a cyberpunk setting?

This happened entirely by accident. I was taking a literature course at the time and we had just started analysing noir works. I fell in love with J. M Cain and Raymond Chandler and so Cyrus was born. The main idea for the novel had always been cyberpunk in the same vein as films like Equilibrium and shows like Dark Angel. The hardboiled element just seemed to fit and Cyrus, once he appeared in my thoughts, demanded the limelight in my story, and so he got it.

5) Do you think the spread of the Singularity concept and its ideal of  transcendent technology will influence people's desire to read things like cyberpunk that draw more firmly from our current interface with  technology?

Hm, that's a really difficult question to answer. I've read articles about how 'boring' the singularity concept has become because of its ubiquity, although many still aren't even aware of the singularity concept or what it really is. As for influencing readers, I'm not sure. Some may avoid cyberpunk because they've had enough of the theme. However, given the current technological climate, I think cyberpunk still has a place in science fiction despite its ageing moniker. Looking at the slew of new releases particularly in the YA category, the human relationship with technology is definitely still a leading theme so cyberpunk is holding its own as a subgenre. Whether that's directly influenced by the singularity concept, I honestly couldn't say.

6) Are there any authors who have influenced your work?
Sure. The two big ones are Neil Gaiman and David Mitchell - not so much in terms of content but rather in how they create their worlds and use language to paint their stories. My main science fiction influence is Philip K Dick, primarily because I saw many of the film adaptations of his work before I read his stories. I've been more influenced by film in the science fiction genre than literature to be honest.

7) Can you tell us about any of your future projects?

My next project is Obscura Burning, a YA science fiction novel about quantum entanglement. That's due for release in December from Etopia Press. I've also just signed with an agent for a YA cyberpunk novel tentatively titled Daughter of the Nether, which I'm hoping will find a home with a publisher in the next couple of months. There are a couple of other works in progress at the moment, all science fiction and tending towards cyberpunk.

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Thanks, Suzanne.

If you'd like to see more from her, check her at:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Suzanne-van-Rooyen/304965232847874

Website: http://suzannevanrooyen.com/

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/5306442.Suzanne_van_Rooyen

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Suzanne_Writer

Dragon's Teeth is available for purchase at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and direct from the publisher, Divertir.

Super Short Story Challenge Genre #1: Cyberpunk and a fantasy review

Thanks to Random.org, cyberpunk has been selected as the genre for my first Super Short Story Challenge Story. My story, in a lightly edited form, will be up Sunday evening.

So, in the meantime, I'm taking suggestions for next week's story.

After you've left a genre/story suggestion, why don't you stop by Good Book Alert and check out my review of the fantasy Ard Magister.

Good Book Alert Review: Shadow of a Dead Star

Over at Good Book Alert, I review indie author Michael Shean's cyberpunk mystery, Shadow of a Dead Star.

Author Interview: Michael Shean, Shadow of a Dead Star

Today I'm interviewing Michael Shean, author of the science fiction noir, Shadow of a Dead Star.

1) Tell us a little bit about your novel.

Shadow of a Dead Star is at its core a story about a man who finds himself caught between the world he knows, the world he wishes it could be, and the world that it truly is.  Thomas Walken is an agent of the Industrial Security Bureau in late 21st century Seattle; his job is to keep illegal technology out of the hands of American citizens.  Most of that technology comes out of Wonderland, the nickname of a future Thailand who allows criminal laboratories to operate within its borders.

At the start of the book, Walken’s job is to intercept a trio of ‘Princess Dolls’, which are little girls who have been kidnapped and transformed into sexual toys for the wealthy and corrupt.  The interception is successful, but when the girls are forcibly taken from federal custody things go very badly very fast.  Suddenly he is on the defensive as everyone connected to the girls starts coming up dead and all his leads dry up.  And that’s only the beginning; as Walken attempts to find the truth, he will find not only his career in jeopardy but his mind and even his soul as well.

2) What inspired your novel?

Many things, I suppose.  I wrote this in 2009 when I was at a particularly angry place in my life, and a lot of the same emotions I experienced then ring throughout the novel.  Isolation, frustration with oneself and with one’s place in society, dissatisfaction with the status quo - Walken hates the people he works so hard to serve, after all, and at the time I felt a lot of that.  I’ve always loved speculative fiction of all kinds, as well as mysteries and noir, so this was a way for me to express my frustration about society and people in general as I felt them at the time.  As I still do, really, though I’m in a more mellow part of the cycle at the moment.

3) Cyberpunk is a subgenre that has seen its relative popularity wax and wane since its inception, particularly with the more recent influence of extreme transhumanist concepts such as the Singularity.  What drew you to this subgenre? Did you have any concern about modern science-fiction fans accepting a new cyberpunk setting that meditates more on the dark side of transhumanism?

Let me first say that I never really had cyberpunk in mind when I wrote the book, but it seems that’s certainly how it turned out.  Now I’m a child of the Eighties, and when I was growing up many of the same forces that worked to establish the cyberpunk genre were in full swing when I was old enough to appreciate them.  The uncertainty of the Cold War, an emerging superconsumer society, etc. - many of these same elements have returned over the last ten years, and a good portion of the American population seem to be either blithely ignorant or very cynical about the change.  That’s something I want to talk about with a greater audience, and the near-future milieu is perfect for this purpose.  As for the darkness of the book, I find that too much of science fiction has become very ‘shiny’, and the message - if there’s one at all - gets lost under an overly polished presentation.  Darkness is a sucker punch; it makes you pay attention.  It’s my hope that Shadow does the same.

4) Dystopic technologically advanced industrial settings filled with moral decay are hardly unknown in science-fiction. What sets your book apart from others?

If anything sets this book apart from others in its genre, I hope it is the way the setting and the characters interact and share a common richness and brutality lacking in other works.  As I said before, I’ve found that in recent years a lot of science fiction has become simplified and overproduced - dystopian science fiction doubly so.  The setting shared by Shadow and other books is hardly rare, but in a great many instances it is romanticized to the point of becoming toothless or irrelevant.  Dystopias exist because people are screwed up, because they have problems, and it should be as organically portrayed as the people themselves.

5) This book is part of a trilogy. When you started writing it, was that your intention?

Absolutely.  The Wonderland Cycle was always planned as a trilogy; it’s just too big of a story to be contained in one or even two volumes.  I’ve always thought that the best stories come in threes, so I wanted to give the story behind the Wonderland Cycle a similar arc.

6) As a native of Washington state I was intrigued by your choice of Seattle over places like LA, NY (or even Tokyo). Why Seattle? The cyberpunk/urban fantasy role-playing game Shadowrun made Seattle as the basis of its setting. Any influence from that?


Well, it’s true that when I was a kid I did read some of the RPG material, but that wasn’t the reason for my selection.  My fiancee hails from the Seattle area, as do several of my friends, and it’s such a strange and interesting place; it seems a garden of the bizarre, and it just captured me that it’s someplace that the ultimate antagonists of the Cycle might take root.

7) There is a lot of gritty subject matter in this book. Although it seems vital for exploring the thematic issues you raised, were you ever worried that you were making your story too dark?

Not terribly.  Hell, if anything I was afraid it was too tame!  The next book is even darker, and I hope that those who have read Shadow will come along with me for an even stranger ride.


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His book, Shadow of a Dead Star, is available for purchase as an e-book at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.