The WD Interview: Mike Chen

What do you think of when you hear science fiction? Do you think of alien species, complex technology, stories taking place in the cold vastness of space? Do you think of unlikely heroes who use their money and their brains to create fantastical metallic armor and take on supervillains? Or high-fantasy alchemists toiling away in crumbling mansions, creating new races designed for hunting monsters? 

Author Mike Chen is thinking of all of these things and more. 

His novel Here and Now and Then is an emotional, genre-bending work about a temporal assassin who gets stranded in the past for 18 years before his rescuer arrives and turns his happy family life upside down. A Beginning at the End takes place six years after a pandemic has wiped out most of the population. We Could Be Heroes is about a superhero and supervillain becoming friends at an anonymous support group, and Vampire Weekend shows you why everything you ever knew about vampires is wrong. These are just some of the novels Chen has penned, though at the center of each, there’s a deep love of character, a playfulness even when things seem bleak, and an overwhelming sense of curiosity—each story tackling a fascinating and beautiful what if?   

This willingness to go where no authors have gone before (do you get the reference?) has led Chen to be a New York Times, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly bestseller, netted him starred reviews from Kirkus, Library Journal, Shelf Awareness, Booklist, and others, and had him receive nominations for the Goodreads Choice, Compton Crook, BSFA, and CALIBA Golden Poppy awards. If you think you don’t like science fiction, there’s probably a Mike Chen novel that will change your mind. 

But every author, even prolific ones, have to start somewhere. For Chen, that meant writing fan fiction as a youngster. That’s where we began our conversation. 

How do you think engaging in fan work early on developed your writing? 

When I talk to college or high school students, I highly emphasize go write fan fiction. The whole point of it is you have the sandbox built for you. You don’t have to come up with who are the characters, what are their motivations, what’s the technology, what’s the magic system? You just say, “I want this character to meet this character in this place for this reason,” and then you can play it out.  

I used to draw a lot of comic strips when I was younger. That was kind of my thing before I discovered prose. It actually wound up being very, very reflective of my future work, because I always found the downtime between major incidents in fantasy or science-fiction stories really interesting. I wanted to see how these characters were coping. I would draw these comic strips of one of my favorite franchises of all time—Robotech, which is this ’80s anime series—that were kind of funny, but also slice of life about, like, what are they talking about in the mess hall before the big battle or after the big battle or while they’re repairing ships or things like that.  

My whole push now when I tell people to write fan fiction, it’s really just about you don’t have to come up with the hard stuff. You can just work on the things that you want. So, in my situation, I was able to, as a kid, play around with these character moments. But now if I’m like, oh, I don’t know, I feel like I’m not good at writing a fight scene with these types of weapons, then I can grab something from Mass Effect or whatever and just put it in there and play it out in my head and then not have to worry about the logistics of it. And then you have fun too, because you’re spending time with characters you love. It’s fun! [Laughs] It’s so much fun. 

You’ve also written novels for Marvel’s What If …? series and for Star Wars. How did you get involved in those projects? 

I get asked this a lot. [Laughs] It is almost fan fiction-y in a way.  

So, when I signed with my agent, we talked about my dream projects, and I said, “I want to write a Star Wars book, because that’s like 90 percent of what I read. In particular, I would like to write a prequel/Clone Wars Star Wars book.” And as my agent got to know the editorial team at Del Rey, now Random House Worlds, he would mention my name, and he would say very specifically, “This is what this author’s interested in. Here’s his work.” I was very lucky that I became friends with Delilah Dawson and Chuck Wendig and Rebecca Roanhorse, and they also mentioned me to the team over there. 

The trick with IP really is just getting in front of them so they know that you exist, and then having people vouch that you’re a good person. [Laughs] Which is seriously really, really important. And that you show you can handle the extreme turnaround and guidelines of an IP. … I was talking with Rebecca Roanhorse, and I was like, “I want to show the editors that I really get this, and I’ve made this insane spreadsheet of logline pitches.” It was like 32 pitches to chronologically go through the Phantom Menace because they were doing the original trilogy. I figured they would follow up with The Empire Strikes Back at some point. So, if I did one for the Phantom Menace, it could be like a, let me show you what I can do without stepping on any projects that you might be working on. And she was like, “That’s a good idea, but wait for your moment to do that.”  

… When Simu Liu was announced as Shang-Chi for Marvel, everyone was like, “Oh my God. He took his shot, and he made it.” So, then the hashtag going around was shoot your shot. And for two days, that’s what everyone was doing. It was either Rebecca or Delilah pinged me and was like, “This is the perfect time to do it because everyone’s doing it.” And so I did it! I unfurled this massive thread of ideas, and they retweeted it—this was back when Twitter was a usable platform. I remember watching very specifically that Jen Heddle at Lucasfilm and Tom [Hoeler] from Del Rey both liked things on there. I’m like, OK. They know I have a sort of knowledge. And I know my book—my debut novel—had gone to them, so they know that I exist. 

… And so it was all of those things. It was professionally having my agent nudge and throw my name into the hat. But then also having friends who could vouch for me that I would not screw up their project. But then also writing fan fiction and putting it out there in a safe way. Because with fan fiction in general, they’re not even allowed to look at fan fiction because there’s so many legal minefields that could come up with that, like people claiming you stole their idea. But for this purpose, it got me on their radar.  

You have written vampires, superheroes, temporal assassins, space aliens … is there something on your list that you haven’t tackled yet, but you’re like, “One day I’m going to do this?” 

The big one that I really wanted to do was a haunted house, and then we sold that. So, I have that coming out next year. I’m just finishing the first draft of it right now. I’ve always loved gothic horror, so that’s been on my writer bucket list.   

My first book was time travel, and my second book was post-apocalyptic. And people were like, “Oh, you didn’t want to just stick with time travel?” And I was like, “No, I don’t want to just be the time travel guy!” I made this joke—it’s like a dartboard of sub genres, and I just want to hit a different one every time before I start to repeat myself. But I have kind of stuck with that when I come up with pitches. Like, I want to just look at the areas that I haven’t quite gone to yet.  

Horror is probably my top favorite genre, both to write and to read. I love a haunted house. So, I’m very excited to hear this. 

[Laughs] I am finding that I actually have to kind of get myself through this. I am rereading The Haunting of Hill House. It’s such an unnerving book, even though I know what happens. But it’s still got that ick that just kind of grows and grows. And then in my manuscript, I’m doing that final prose polish before I send it to my editor. When I’m reading it I know that mechanically, there’s plenty of tension here, but I don’t feel tension in it. Did I get it all wrong? And I was talking with Delilah Dawson about this, and she’s like, “Oh no, it’s because you’ve written a horror book, but you’re also reading it for the 20^th time, and you hate it by now. It doesn’t feel scary anymore. Like, you’re scared of your editor, not of the haunting!” I’m at that phase right now. 

I wanted to ask about editing, because The Photonic Effect is such a large-scale novel. It’s got a lot of voices, a lot of plot lines. Something cool always has to be left on the cutting room floor. Do you find it difficult to trim those things away?  

No. It was the same thing about switching titles. I think of all of my books, I have only come up with the title twice. Everything else has been a collaborative effort with editorial and marketing. My second book, A Beginning at the End, I had originally called it The Pause as in, the world doesn’t end, it pauses. It came out in January 2020, which was like the worst time. [Laughs] But that was a real big learning experience in just letting go and trusting the professionals. And it became easier between that and then more editorial stuff where I’m just like, you guys are probably right. It’s fine. Even if I feel inner resistance, I’m just assuming that other people are smarter than me. 

As somebody who grew up daydreaming about what it would be like to live on the Enterprise, coming into The Photonic Effect felt like a brand-new adventure, but also wonderfully homey. Where did the idea for the novel and this crew in particular come from? 

Star Trek fans will notice the name of the captain, Captain Demora Kim, as in Harry Kim from “Voyager” and Demora Sulu from Star Trek VI. The idea, so it was actually [editor] Nivia [Evans who] had reached out to my agent and asked if I was interested in brainstorming a space adventure. And I was like, “Yes! I would!” She asked if I had any ideas. I have this folder in my Google Drive, and it’s titled Random Ideas. When I’m walking my dog or whatever, and an idea comes in, I jot it down in there. There was one in there that’s the title was “Just After Voyager.” Because—wait, have you seen “Voyager”? 

Oh, yes. 

OK, so you know, “Voyager” just ends. There’s no emotional catharsis. “Deep Space Nine” has one of the best finales of all time. They give the right amount of time for emotional processing. And then “Voyager” does not. I kept thinking, how are these people feeling after “Voyager?” What if they came home and had to fight in the Dominion War? So that was just like this logline I had.  

Nivia and I scheduled a call, and I took a moment to flesh this out into something more. And I’m like, well, I can’t just use Star Trek stuff. [Laughs] I started to pull in these other ideas. … I like the idea of being trapped somewhere and then being forced to form a civilization. That’s where the idea of the photonic gravity came in. There are little bits of Mass Effect in there. The idea of the photonic species is from “Voyager” … It started off with this very loose idea of thinking about “Voyager” and “Deep Space Nine” and then breaking it off into like, what can reflect the state of our world, the politics of it. Because I love Star Trek, but our world is not that clean. I don’t want to write a utopian society. I think it’s more pressing to write something that reflects the state of our world. … And so that’s what this book is about. You need intersectionality and acceptance if you are going to move forward; otherwise, the bad actors are just going to take over. 

Something else I noticed about this novel is that you have an alien race that has pure passive syntax when speaking English, and you have a character who has idioms that nobody else understands. When drafting, was that really difficult to keep in mind? 

Yes. It was incredibly difficult. [Laughs] The problem with being a science-fiction nerd is that you know what’s been done already. In particular for Nera and his species … I came up with the passive syntax because I wanted it to be a combination of biological, like the way that their brains think, but that also makes them a subservient species in in their original form. And so that worked as a character point for me. … 

The idioms were fun, because it’s the version of multiverse that I like the best. … I remember doing this very intentional listening of conversations and radio discussions or TV discussion and how often people will slip in an idiom. You don’t even think about it. But if you took it apart, literally this makes no sense. That was fun to play with, and that was easier than coming up with an alien dialect. 

It’s always lovely to see an author who thinks about language in that way when it comes to characters, especially in novels like this where we have several perspectives. For Photonic, how did you decide which character gets to tell the next part of the story? 

Part of it’s balancing. I’m a planner. I write a really big synopsis first, and then I break it up into 25 percent acts. From there, I will take two or three sentences or a paragraph from the synopsis and break it into chapter segments. And in a situation like this, then it goes into a big spreadsheet. I start assigning who I think the character point of view will work best for, like, they have to physically be there, but then also who is undergoing the most character change in that perspective. But then you have to think about sequencing too, because it wouldn’t be fair to have four chapters of one character and then you switch off and then you go back to that other character. There were some chapters where I had to flip perspectives because I knew the story had to go here, but Demi was getting too much screen time. It’s very mechanical in a way, because you’re thinking that you have to balance pace, you have to balance exposure, but you also have to look at the intrinsic character work too. 

Does a lot of that decision making happen before you start drafting? Is that all of your lead up into writing? 

Yeah. I would say like 75 percent of that comes in an outline on my spreadsheet. I can get a grasp over the whole scope of it. I try to write act by act. My drafting goes like skeleton, which is mostly dialogue and stage direction, then I start to fill in the prose, and then I start to fill in the details. I try to finish the first act and make that as good as possible, so I have to do less of that building up when I get to the next one.  

I find after I complete the first act and I feel like I know the characters and the world better, then I can go back to the spreadsheet and be like, Oh, should I move the perspective for this chapter because it makes more sense for this person? And I’ve also done things where I might re-sequence a plot beat so the character spread is a little bit more balanced. It’s very engineer-y based. [Laughs] You won’t be surprised to know that I have an engineering degree. 

I’m not. [Laughs] You have a lot of these complex scientific ideas that remain very accessible to readers. How do you find yourself breaching that knowledge gap without sacrificing the story? 

I find that this is a difficult thing to learn about writing science fiction. I see it a lot of newer writers in science fiction or fantasy—they will try to put all their mechanics in the first two chapters of the book to explain everything. I’m constantly telling people that you don’t need to do that.  

What I do personally is I put all the necessary mechanics into a spreadsheet and then I decide what is appropriate for each chapter, because you have enough space, right? Like with Here and Now and Then, the first thing that I had to decide to form the story is, is time travel magic? Or is it science? That’s something that you have to explicitly define right away. … You have so much space to work with, and there’s always a turning point where the reader has to know the mechanics by a certain point in order for the plot to turn. It’s up to the author to know what’s essential and how to pace out where it is.  

But for making it relatable, I find that the most important thing is not overloading it at the beginning—that’s important. But the other thing is consistency. If you make it simple and consistent, then your readers will get it.  

What’s a final piece of advice you have for the readers of WD that we haven’t yet discussed? 

Don’t give up. I know that’s trite, but I want to back it up with everyone I know who has not given up, who has wanted it enough, got an agent and sold. I could start pointing you to a list of people that I started writing with [in] like 2008–2010, and you can get their book now at Barnes & Noble. It took us [on] different journeys, but we just kept at it, and the people who dropped off because they feel burnt out or they just didn’t want to do it anymore or they wanted to do something else—which is totally valid and fine! But if you feel in your bones that you need to do this, if you keep an open mind about feedback and keep working on your craft, you will break through.  

You’re rolling the dice, but you have unlimited rolls. You will eventually hit your 20.