Having a kid, especially your first, can be stressful for anyone.
But imagine if you lived in a somewhat dystopian future, and had anxiety, and were then told you couldn’t legally use the very thing that makes your life that helps you manage said anxiety because you’re having a baby…and the kid was coming under somewhat stressful circumstances.
Such is the condition under which we find Valya, the main character in author Koji A. Dae’s dark science fiction novel Casual (paperback, Kindle).
In the following email interview, Dae explains what inspired and influenced this rather personal sci-fi story.
To start, what is Casual about, and when and where does it take place?
Casual is set after a vaguely referenced social collapse, when the rich live underground in crystal caves and the poor live above ground in a hostile environment. The violence has settled, and things are slowly returning to normal, but things such as travel bans and high pollution levels have drastically changed day-to-day life to a more digital-focused experience.
The book focuses on a pregnant woman named Valya, and takes place during her final trimester. Valya has a neural implant called Casual which manages her anxiety through a somewhat addictive game interface. The law requires her to turn off the implant before giving birth if she plans to be the sole caregiver of her child. Her abusive ex is out of the picture, she is no-contact with her family, and she has limited support from friends. The book follows her exploring her options and trying to make the best choice for her own mental health and for her baby’s future.
What is it about? Well, it’s about mental health and pregnancy — something I really wanted to address. But it’s also about travel, class, and freedom.
As far as location, it takes place in a city very loosely based on Sofia, Bulgaria. Actually, a lot of the geography is based on the small mountain town Gabrovo, which is in the middle of Bulgaria, but the book required a slightly larger population and more robust infrastructure, and so it ended up being a mix of Gabrovo and Sofia. When I was writing it, I imagined it sometime after WWIII, in 2060 or 2070. But now that it is coming out, it almost seems more “near” than that. Perhaps 2040.
Where did you get the idea for Casual?
When I started writing it, I really wanted a science fiction book that focused on mental health during pregnancy. I had spent years managing my depression through running, but a knee injury stopped the long distances needed to have a sense of control. This was right before I finally went on antidepressants for the first time. I couldn’t go to movie theaters because of the soundscapes, and I struggled even being a passenger in a car.
My anxiety became debilitating during pregnancy and even worse while I was postpartum. My worsening mental health during and after my pregnancy was something I was completely unprepared for. As a culture, we don’t discuss the process of pregnancy a lot, and even when we do, we rarely talk about the mental health aspects of it. I feel that postpartum psychosis is sometimes explored in horror, but it is often exploited rather than explored in a compassionate, nuanced way. Pregnancy and childbirth are rarely featured in other speculative genres.
When I was looking for any way to “fix” myself, I came across deep brain stimulation, which has successfully eased treatment-resistant depression in some cases. Since then, there’s been more progress with both neural implant technology, such as Neuralink, and even non-invasive wearables meant to monitor and control mental health issues. To me, it seems we’re still a long way off from treating mental health issues with wearables or implants, but I have no doubt it will be part of our future.
Being a sci-fi writer, I of course mixed that tech with my favorite game, and the idea for Casual was born.
It sounds like Casual is a dystopian sci-fi story, but that the sci-fi aspects are minimal. In fact, it sounds almost like you could’ve cut them out altogether by making Casual a pill instead of an app. Or am wrong about this?
Ha! I think the fear of all sci-fi writers is that the science could be stripped away without affecting the story.
But actually, I don’t think the neural tech in Casual could be replaced by a pill. One of the very important aspects of the technology is continuous monitoring — a sort of feedback loop that not only makes minor adjustments in the amount of “medication” given to the user, but also allows the user a significant amount of control over their treatment. Current medication for anxiety involves a lot of trial and error to get the correct type and dosage, and when you take a pill, it affects you for hours, days, even weeks. It involves peaks and plateaus, and though there is medication for acute symptoms, there is limited day-to-day control.
The book is really about exploring patient autonomy — and it does so by taking the medication to a place where the patient could realistically have full control of their treatment.
So then how do you describe Casual, genre-wise?
I tend to say it is dark sci-fi because of the setting and technology. But there are definitely aspects of it that bleed into horror and even some fantastical elements such as the crystal technology that the richer citizens have access to. I think literary sci-fi has also been floated around.
Some early reviewers have called it dystopian or soft dystopian, which actually shocked me. Although that assessment totally fits, I guess I never realized I was writing a dystopian — I was writing near future, and I guess I never realized what an edge of dystopia we are currently riding as a society.
Casual is your first novel, though you previously published a novella called Mazi and a poetry collection, Scars That Never Bleed, which is about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Are there any writers, or specific stories, that had a big influence on Casual but not on anything else you’ve written?
If we’re talking about the structure of the book, it was heavily influenced by Pamela Erens’ Eleven Hours. It’s not quite a dual timeline, but instead looks at the way we experience our personal history in specific moments of our current life through an asynchronous timeline. This is the closest I’ve come to reading a book that feels like how I experience the world, and I wanted to write something in that same style.
When I was writing Casual, I was very into short fiction and was reading or listening to dozens of short stories a week. I am sure a lot of them influenced my writing. One that stands out in my mind is “The Propagator” by Simone Kern, which I read in Metamorphosis Magazine while I was working on Casual.
What about non-literary influences? Was Casual influenced by any movies, TV shows, or games?
I think I was watching a lot of Black Mirror and Love, Death & Robots while I was writing and editing Casual. I’ve always been into near future sci-fi, but those shows (especially Black Mirror) made me realize that there was a cultural place for that weird exploration of our next misstep as a society.
The game aspect was inspired by casual video games. I was first introduced to the concept of casual games by a friend in the early 2010s, and eventually they shared with me a very calm, beautiful matching game called Two Dots. I played it a lot during my first pregnancy. Though it wasn’t meant to, it helped ease my anxiety. Of course, the game was just a distraction, but I was curious what a casual game that could actually help reduce anxiety in a more clinical way would look like.
Roxy
And what about your cat, Roxy? How did she influence Casual?
Actually, we adopted her after I wrote Casual. That’s the thing about books — writing them can be slow. Publishing them can be even slower. By the time they reach the great, wide world, a lot of personal stuff may have changed. I will say having that purr-ball around the house has done wonders for my depression.
One interesting thing about Casual is that it has illustrations by artist Helen Whistberry. Whose decision was it to include illustrations in Casual?
That was the decision of Matt and Alex at Tenebrous [Casual‘s publisher]. Most (maybe all?) of the Tenebrous books have internal art. I love working with a team that cares so much about art. I had never dreamed Casual would get internal artwork, and when I saw it, I was thrilled by it.
So whose decision was it to hire Helen Whistberry to do the illustrations?
That was all the Tenebrous team, but I think they made an excellent choice. The blending of the geometric and natural in Helen’s artwork does a great job of capturing the messiness of the human-tech interaction that Casual explores.
Now, dystopian sci-fi novels are sometimes stand-alone stories, and sometimes part of a larger saga. But Casual sounds like it’s a stand-alone story. Again, I ask: Am I wrong?
You’re neither right nor wrong, there. While I was writing Casual, I went back and forth on whether it would be a stand-alone book or a trilogy, and ultimately decided that I wanted to write a stand-alone book. While this is partly because it’s simpler to write and publish a stand-alone novel, the main reason why I ended where I did was because the book drew on a lot of my personal experiences, and at the time I felt that I was entering a new period of my life — one beyond that world.
If I’m perfectly honest, I still haven’t discounted the idea of writing the trilogy. If I do return to this story, it would not be a direct continuation of Casual, though. Instead, I would want to explore parenting issues of raising a child in a technology-driven world. I would love to check in on Valya 10 years after her child is born, and again as the child is becoming an adult. I would also want to look more at social disobedience and the return to nature that is teased in Casual. We’d see a lot more of Skylar in book two and three, and perhaps a redeeming side to him. Maybe.
Earlier I asked if Casual was influenced by any movies, TV shows, or games. But to flip things around, do you think Casual could work as a movie, a TV show, or a game?
Though the book features a few different games, I don’t think a game could be made based off of the book simply because it draws too heavily on games that already exist. I also think that most games need a clear goal, and the strength of Casual is its messiness — there are no right answers. No one way out. No next level.
Honestly, I also think it would be somewhat difficult to pull off as a movie or series, because the book is very internal. There is a lot of reflection, not just in the asynchronous time lines, but also in the form of the main character’s internal monologue and psychological trauma.
That being said, I would love to see someone take on the challenge and interpret it visually. For example, I think in the right hands it could make an awesome animated show akin to Love, Death & Robots. Alternatively, it could be represented more realistically in a short series similar to Behind Her Eyes.
But if someone did take on that challenge, and decided to make an animated TV show based on Casual, who would you want them to cast as Valya, her ex, her shrink, and the other main characters?
Ohhh casting is so difficult because I have face aphasia which makes it difficult for me to remember actors.
Shooting for the moon, I’d say Nina Dobrev [The Vampire Diaries] as Valya, because of her Bulgarian roots. Other than that, I’d love a mostly Bulgarian and European cast of lesser known actors.
So, is there anything else you think potential readers need to know about Casual?
Less of something that people should know and more of me wanting to say thank you to the people who read Casual. This is really the book of my heart. It has a lot of myself in it, and I was a bit terrified to release it into the wild. But now that people have started to read it, I’m really happy that I shared it.
Finally, if someone enjoys Casual, what dystopian sci-fi-ish novel or novella of someone else’s would you suggest they check out and why that?
This is when I admit for longform fiction, I mostly read outside of the genres I write.
Right now I’m obsessed with Katee Robert’s Dark Olympus series and all of Gillian Flynn’s work, neither of which is anything like Casual, so I might not be the best person to give recommendations.
That being said, if you like the internality of Casual, try Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi; their lyricism and internality is amazing. If you like the dystopian aspect of it, try Lignin by Ai Jiang; that’s got a fantastic, tight dystopian community to it. If you like the weirdness of it, go for anything published by Tenebrous. I started with Soft Targets by Carson Winter, and that was the book that made me realize that maybe Casual could find a readership.
