One young woman faces down an all-powerful corporation in this all-too-near future science fiction debut that reads like a refreshing take on Ready Player One, with a heavy dose of Black Mirror.
We chat with author Nicole Kornher-Stace about her latest novel Firebreak, as well as writing, book recommendations, and more!
Hi, Nicole! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
Hmm. I read a lot of books, play a lot of video and board games, and have gotten into growing food since the pandemic started. I live in upstate NY within walking distance of a library and four different hiking trails (yes, these are both major reasons why I decided to move where I did). I have a cat who likes to ride around on my shoulder and a kid who’s somehow about to be taller than me and never lets me hear the end of it. I like to yell a lot online about books that center friendships over romances and how we need more of them in the world, and I write books that add more examples of that to the pile. And I live in constant existential crisis because I love to write but I hate sitting inside at a desk. If someone invents a way to write, revise, publish, and promote books while being outside all day, let me know.
How is your 2021 going in comparison to that other year?
Weird! Good weird though. I have two books about to come out (imminently and pretty much on top of each other) after zero books coming out since 2018 and 2015 before that. So it’s been busy! I’ve been able to get outside a lot more than I was last spring when everyone was locked down though, which is the absolute best thing possible for my mental health. I live in a townhouse condo thingy with no kind of private backyard, and I spent the whole of spring 2020 aaaalmost regretting not buying a house with a yard that nobody was constantly breathing their mystery germs into. Almost. But on the whole it’s been pretty good! I still really miss my weekly board game nights, but we’re all getting vaccinated these days, so…soon? Hopefully?
Quick lightning round! Tell us the first book you ever remember reading, the one that made you want to become an author, and one that you can’t stop thinking about!
What made me want to become an author was actually just realizing when I was a kid that I wanted to have about twenty different careers and wouldn’t be able to explore them all in one lifetime. Somewhere in parallel universes there’s a paleontologist Nicole, an astrophysicist Nicole, a Nicole who has somehow figured out how to make a living from hanging out with octopuses all day, etc. At some point around age ten, already solidly a bookworm, I realized that I could dip into all the stuff that interested me forever if I became a writer. So here we are. The book that brought it all together for me though was some volume of the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies edited by Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow, which my dad picked up for me at a used bookstore and did not skim through in any way to see if it was too much for a twelve-year-old. So that pretty much blew my whole mind wide open. It exposed me to writers who’d end up being utterly formative for teen-writer me (along with WAY more sex and violence than my innocent eyes had ever seen in print before), but it also gave me the exact answer I’d been looking for. I knew I wanted to write. That book (and the volumes I hunted down relentlessly after) told me what I wanted to write. And I’ve been writing speculative fiction ever since.
When did you first discover your love for writing?
I was always what you’d call a bookish child. I learned to read when I was two, and it was my favorite hobby until I discovered video games, at which point it…was probably still my favorite hobby, but video games were and are, um, up there. So it was a pretty natural progression for me from I love books! to I wonder if I could…make a book? to I love video games! to I wonder if I could…make a video game? to taking inspiration from both and writing books that are heavily informed by video games. This is at its least subtle in Firebreak, which is about a woman who makes the largest part of her cobbled-together gig economy living from livestreaming a massively online multiplayer wargame in the year 2134. But the influence has always been there. The love of both media grew up in me intertwined. I couldn’t separate them if I wanted.
Your latest novel, Firebreak, is out May 4th 2021! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Videogame streamer turns anticorporate activist. I’m sure I’ll come up with something better as soon as I send this email. That’s how this kind of thing usually works out.
What can readers expect?
Well, the backcover copy describes it as part Ready Player One and part Cyberpunk 2077, but in my head it’s more what if a big dumb action movie had a baby with a Rage Against the Machine album. It’s got gaming and takes place in a Black Mirror-esque cyberpunk future, but at its core it’s about a social media/grassroots fight for human rights in a literally corporate-owned police state. The world is very Action Movie (mechs! swordfights! corporate intrigue!) but the heart is very Solidarity Forever. (There’s online grassroots activism. There’s a protest. There’s a lot of general sticking it to corrupt systems that richly deserve it.) It also is about friendship, because honestly all my books are about friendship. The core dynamic is two women gamers who get in over their heads, but there are also two other platonic relationships that are very, very important to the story. One of them is a M/F friendship stronger than death, and the other is the aromantic/asexual protagonist’s fierce platonic crush. A platonic crush specifically is something I desperately needed to write and punt back in time to teen-me, so she’d have one (1) example, in the thousands of books and movies and games she devoured, of a true representation of her feelings. I don’t have a time machine so I can’t do that, but hopefully it will find some other readers to resonate with instead.
Where did the inspiration for Firebreak come from?
This is always a very dangerous question for me because my whole process goes: gather a ton of different ideas, the more mismatched the better, then glue them all together and see what falls off and what sticks. What sticks somehow turns into a book. I’m not entirely sure how that part works. It’s a lot faster than the first part. I spent three years telling myself I wasn’t good enough to write this book and then went you know what, fuck it and drafted it in five weeks. But the first part, the waiting and gluing stuff together (in this case totally subconsciously while beating myself up for no reason, thanks brain) is key. As frustrating as it is at the time, there’d be no book without it. There never is.
But for me, Firebreak was a book that was a long time coming. Not just those three years but my whole life. I’ve been angry since my teens about all of the issues I explore in Firebreak (systematic corruption, corporate greed, the police state, blatant human rights violations in the name of profit), and I’ve always been a gamer. I wanted the book to be about women gamers because we are very underrepresented. I wanted it to have an aro/ace protagonist because we’re also very underrepresented. It depicts a dystopia but one that in many ways we’re really not that far off from. I wanted to depict an obsessive platonic fangirl crush in a way that was never played for laughs or depicted as ridiculous–Mal’s feelings, while unrelatable to those around her, are never treated as anything less than 100% valid. And it’s got some stuff in it that I don’t want to get into because it’s spoilery but which readers of my previous books might appreciate.
Can you tell us about any challenges you faced while writing and how you were able to overcome them?
Mostly with this one it was the fact that I talked myself out of writing it for three solid years. It was too complex! Too hard! Deals with too many issues! I won’t be able to do it justice! Etc. But a large part of the writing process for me is telling the self-doubt to take a seat, preferably in a box, which you then nail shut and pitch in a river, so you can finally get to work. After that? This was back in 2018. My kid was still in school. But around spring break, I started realizing that if I was going to shut up and write this book, I had a rapidly closing window of time before he was out of school for the summer and my writing time would get kicked straight out a window until September. So I did what a rational professional adult would do. I panicked. I paced around my dining room table for a solid week, plotting out the book. And then I sat down and drafted it. I could not have done this if he wasn’t in school, or if my amazing neighbor hadn’t watched him after school for a couple of weeks when I was getting down to the wire. But it worked out! The year after that, I ended up pulling my kid out of school because I’d always told him I’d homeschool him if he ever wanted me to do that (I desperately wanted this as a kid and I never got it, so.) and that turned out to be in the middle of the school year. But a promise is a promise, so out he went. Luckily, I’d drafted both Firebreak and my middle-grade debut Jillian vs. Parasite Planet in the same year, so as long as I found a home for one of them, my writing career might actually be able to survive a little longer despite homeschooling. Against all odds, I found homes for both. So that’s been very reassuring.
Were there any favourite moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
I always write the books I want to read, so the whole thing is usually fun, honestly. I loved being able to tap into my video gaming background to write Mal and Jessa’s streaming partnership, and I loved the challenge of writing characters like 06 and 22 in a necessarily extremely understated kind of way–they’re not on-page much because they can’t be, and they have some other (spoilery) stuff going on that precludes them from being major characters in a way I’d want them to be. 22 especially was a lot of fun to write, and most of the reasons are (also, sorry) spoilery. Basically, I had to kind of characterize him around the edges, if that makes sense? I couldn’t bring him into full focus as a character–the plot arc precludes it–and I already have readers saying they wish I’d done more with him. They want his whole deal: his entire backstory, his relationship with 06, all of it. It reminds me of how I always love the minor characters best: the ones who only get a few lines of spoken dialogue or screen time or whatever, and I, as the reader or viewer or gamer, have to fill in the blanks myself if I want them filled at all. It makes the whole process more interactive. If you are such a reader, know that there is more 22–and more 06–out there in the world to find. Happy hunting. 🙂
What do you love about the science fiction genre?
Oh jeez. A lot. I love the imagination. I love the science. I love the worldbuilding. I love the adventure. I love being dumped in the deep end of an in medias res sandbox that I get to piece together contextually, chapter by chapter, until it becomes a whole little pocket universe to explore. I love that you can take any played-out trope and put your own spin on it and make it new. But mostly I love that you can do all the character-exploration work you can do in a contemporary/literary book, except in a world that, for better or worse, is about eighteen billion times more interesting than the one I’m stuck living in the rest of the time. I don’t want to read about how somebody’s bad decisions wrecked their career and their marriage. I want to read about how somebody’s bad decisions trashed their spaceship and got their best friend lost in a parallel dimension and caused a zombie outbreak and started a time-looping intergalactic war. If their career and marriage got wrecked in the process, I mean. sure, fine.
What’s the best and the worst writing advice you have received?
The best was when one of my high school English teachers told the class (about grammar): “Once you learn all the rules, you’re free to break them at will.” Apologies to every reviewer who’s ever complained about my run-ons and fragments. My teacher said it was okay. The worst would have to be, “You should really think about turning your book into a movie. That’s where the money’s at.” Oh wow. Thank you. I never would have known. Please hold while I get my notebook and write this down before I forget.
What’s next for you?
Right now I’m working on three projects. I’m kicking around a kind of anticapitalist body horror thing that I really want to sit down and write but haven’t found the time yet. I’m drafting the third and final Archivist Wasp book chapter by chapter on my Patreon. And also on my Patreon I’ve spent the past few months working on a ridiculous fluff story in which 06 and 22, two characters from Firebreak, run off at age twelve to have a Boxcar Children-esque adventure in a shipping container. It’s extremely stupid and people are being much kinder to it than is probably warranted. But it’s the exact level of non-work writing my brain can handle right now, so it’s therapeutic if nothing else.
Lastly, do you have any book recommendations for our readers?
Right now I’m reading Collateral Damage by Taylor Simonds, and it is an unmitigated delight. It’s full of superhero fandom heart, friendship, action, nefarious schemes, etc. Plus, it centers an absolutely charming pair of m/f besties, which is my forever jam. Plotwise, the book is basically: what if The Boys, except wholesome. Check it out!
