Rob Ziegler is the author of Seed, available now from Nightshade Books and your favorite book retailers.
It’s the dawn of the 22nd century, and the world has fallen apart. Decades of war and resource depletion have toppled governments. The ecosystem has collapsed. A new dust bowl sweeps the American West. The United States has become a nation of migrants–starving masses of nomads roaming across wastelands and encamped outside government seed distribution warehouses.
In this new world, there is a new power: Satori. More than just a corporation, Satori is an intelligent, living city risen from the ruins of the heartland. She manufactures climate-resistant seed to feed humanity, and bio-engineers her own perfected castes of post-humans Designers, Advocates and Laborers. What remains of the United States government now exists solely to distribute Satori product; a defeated American military doles out bar-coded, single-use seed to the nation’s hungry citizens.
Secret Service Agent Sienna Doss has watched her world collapse. Once an Army Ranger fighting wars across the globe, she now spends her days protecting glorified warlords and gangsters. As her country slides further into chaos, Doss feels her own life slipping into ruin.
When a Satori Designer goes rogue, Doss is tasked with hunting down the scientist-savant–a chance to break Satori’s stranglehold on seed production and undo its dominance. In a race against Satori’s genetically honed assassins, Doss’s best chance at success lies in an unlikely alliance with Brood–orphan, scavenger and small-time thief–scraping by on the fringes of the wasteland, whose young brother may possess the key to unlocking Satori’s power. As events spin out of control, Sienna Doss and Brood find themselves at the heart of Satori, where an explosive finale promises to reshape the future of the world.
The Challenges of Blending Genres.
by Rob Ziegler
There were two challenges for me in writing Seed. First, I wanted to write about a world where the pressing issues of present day humanity—broadly, the interrelated problems of climate change, resource depletion and corporate hegemony—had reached unmitigated extremes. Seed’s world is one of scarcity, drought and wide-spread starvation, where the last corporation makes its living fucking the little guy, and the government is too weak to stop it. (No really, it takes place in the future, I promise.) The challenge was, I wanted the story to be fun. Which meant the writing, scene to scene, had to be fun for me. I wanted this world to be big enough, weird enough, that I could follow my fascinations. The second challenge was, the things that fascinated me in this story don’t make an intuitively obvious blend, genre-wise. The eldritch world of extreme bioengineering, for example, doesn’t, if one were to do a quick word association, lead to the spaghetti western. And the spaghetti western, in turn, does not stand elbows linked with tech-fetishizing, military sci fi. For me, though, they all stewed together. Mostly this was because I was fixated on certain characters—characters who, to me, felt akin one another, despite being native to disparate settings. Like a lot of people, I love anti-heroes, and of a particular sort: outlaws and fringe dwellers. I love the weird and often-times dark worlds they inhabit. Sergio Leone’s Man with No Name, Case in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Irvine Welsh’s Edinburgh heroin punks, the kid in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, even Han Solo. Outsiders, all of them, some because of disenfranchisement, some by choice, but each a disaffected expression of the landscapes from which they emerge. They spark for me, in part because their moral ambiguity makes their heroism seem something that yokes them, a burden of their better natures that belies an ethos of pragmatism, texturing the rare moment of decency and turning it into something bigger, something defining. But also, I love them simply because they’re bad. When they transgress, we transgress with them. Outlaws are fun. Seed began for me with Brood and Hondo Loco, the highwaymen. Brood and Hondo inhabit a very specific type of world, set along the migrant tracks of the droughted west, full of scavengers and thieves—a brutal world, in the spirit of Peckinpah. They are bad guys, who steal crop seed from even worse guys. In Seed, this makes them something close to good guys. Steely-eyed Robin Hoods of the badlands. The first draft of the book belonged almost entirely to them, and to the exploration of their ilk’s strange frontier civility, a code based on the tacit acknowledgement between people that the deeds done in a hard land are done out of necessity. It’s never personal, except when it is. In this context, the smallest act of kindness acquires a nobility that resonates. With Brood and Hondo, I wanted their decency to be something the world would never quite allow them to express, but that hummed, tangible to the reader, just beneath the surface of their actions. They’re good people who do bad things. They serve as contrast to the book’s straight hero, Sienna Doss. Doss is a hardened ex-commando, and her world is steeped in tropes of the military sci fi to which I grew up addicted—cool tech, badass weapons and tactics, and lots of action. Where Brood and Hondo are denizens of the new, barren world, ruthless but with a carpe mañana vibe, Doss is unwavering, all nerve, grit and can-do, a patriot and guardian of the old world, one not unlike our world today. I’m not averse to loving a straight hero, as long as they’re in some way compromised. In Doss, I found an echo of Heller’s Yossarian. Jaded by the absurdities of war and of the military, Doss shoulders the weight of disillusionment throughout. Her despair is matched only by her stoicism. She remains duty-bound, a guardian and vestige of the country she loves, even as it decays inexorably into the past. The third narrative thread is where things got difficult. Sumedha’s world, and by extension Satori’s, is steeped in bioengineered strangeness. Satori is the corporation that develops, season by season, the crop seed for the country’s fading populace. Sumedha is the genetically engineered designer, Satori’s employee, or servant, or disciple. His world, one of extreme biotech, gave me the opportunity to build bizarre settings, and to embrace the fanciful. I loved having very weird characters endeavor to do very weird things. I also wanted to play with the idea of the corporation as a sort of organism, one whose values are defined purely by survival instinct and response to simple stimuli: hunger, and an aversion to pain. Satori is (spoiler alert!) quite literally alive, something more than human, but also something less. Stylistically, these three narratives couldn’t be more different. Meshing them consistently demanded that the world of Seed be a complicated one, where the recent past—full of cities and grocery stores and navies and all the things we take for granted in the world today—be constantly and painfully recalled, and fetishized. A world where the one thing that might save humanity also threatens it with obsolescence. It was a difficult blend, but for me, it was a whole lot of fun.
