What I really love about this story are the small pieces of observation that is so profound, poetic and powerful. My favourite is “as long as some things are lost, we can imagine perfection.” What inspired you to write this?

The germ of this story was born in the 2021 stage of the pandemic, while watching a panel on lost Doctor Who episodes during a virtual version of our local Doctor Who convention, CONsole Room. I wanted to write about the way that seemingly frivolous things like fandom still persist even in the darkest times, sometimes offering solace, community, or a temporary escape, and sometimes just because as fans, it’s an inescapable part of how we interact with the world. Humans love stories, and even in an apocalypse, we can find ourselves eagerly awaiting a new release, theorizing about a villain’s motivations, or writing fanfiction to make two characters finally kiss. As for the idea that “as long as some things are lost, we can imagine perfection,” I think we’re all familiar with the idea of a story we build up so grandly in our imagination that the real thing could never live up to it. A real story is one thing, which you may like or not; the imagined story is infinite, with a different facet for each person filling in the blanks. To me, this dovetails with the feeling of an uncertain future, whether due to a a real-life pandemic or an imaginary famine: as long as we don’t know for certain that we are doomed, we can keep imagining hope, and maybe, just maybe, we’ll be right.

The point of view in this story is so exciting and wittily deals with political and technological issues. What made you choose this PoV for the story and what was the challenging aspect of this viewpoint?

The POV was integral to the idea right from the start. As a writer, commitment to format is important to me–I got so annoyed as a kid at those Dear America books that were supposed to be journals but included pages of dialogue!–so it was important to me not to “cheat” and deviate from anything that might be transcribed from a recording of a convention panel where the panelist was mic’d but the audience was not. In order to keep the monologue natural, there’s also quite a lot of information that the reader does not get, or that only gets briefly alluded to. This does create a higher barrier for entry for some readers, but thankfully a lot of speculative fiction fans enjoy being thrown in at the deep end and figuring it out on their own. I certainly do!

There is a lot of conversation about censorship in this story. Especially that erasure speaks of something more clearly than the expression itself. What do you think this story wants to tell about censorship?

One thing that changed in the course of writing this story was the conversation on censorship. Originally, I had planned to talk only about government censorship and its repercussions. But as I was writing, streaming services started pulling television shows, and fully filmed movies were scrapped for tax breaks; piracy surged as people realized that we didn’t really own the stories we had paid for. I think in the end, what this story is trying to say is that there will always be people who want to suppress stories, whether to control the flow of information, to demonize groups of people, or to simply line their own pockets. But stories are more slippery than that. You may think you have neatly sliced away all the objectionable bits, but people find the meaning they need to find no matter what you do, and if they can’t find it, they create it.

Adding another question to the list of questions: Why is there no great unbroken treasure? Is there a broken treasure to be found? Or is the act of finding a problem?

The future is always uncertain. The narrator says “I don’t believe there is a great unbroken treasure waiting for us.” How can they? They are living through a famine, clinging to the normalcy of fan theories and internet debates even as what they thought of as the solid bedrock of their life, of their society, crumbles beneath them. The narrator is not their hero, the fictional Backwards Man, traveling forever backwards in time towards cause and certainty. The narrator is us, ordinary and imperfect, wracked by our knowledge of our inadequacies and missteps in the face of global trauma. Your mileage in believing the future is a great unbroken treasure may vary.

But then, of course, there’s the narrator’s next line: “Of course, even as I say that–we never stop hoping, do we?”

Are there any projects you are working on currently? And if not are there any themes, objects, or news that might be tickling your fingers?

Much of my time for the next couple months will be spent on a work-for-hire project, with breaks to refill the creative well by writing some extremely self-indulgent fanfiction. However, I hope to make some time to incorporate some recent feedback into a second draft of a short story partially inspired by the Chowchilla documentary about a 1976 kidnapping of a school bus full of children, which yes, I did also make about pandemic trauma. I also have a short story forthcoming in Not Your Papi’s Utopia: Latinx Visions of Radical Hope.