21Nothing received a 4+ star review, making it an IndieReader Approved title.
Following find an interview with author Philip Olsen Riendeau.
What is the name of the book and when was it published?
The name of the book is 21Nothing, and it was published on July 31, 2022.
What’s the book’s first line?
“By the time the drone car rops Lata at the bhang shop in East Largo, the sun has begun to set and is casting showy rays of orange light across the fringed tips of slash pines in the west.”
What’s the book about? Give us the “pitch.”
The book is about a bunch of misfits riding out the long, slow decline of civilization following a series of ecological crises. Corporations and governments having long abandoned any semblance of fealty to reason, the bourgeoisie fall prey to a scheme to have their minds uploaded to corporate servers, where they will supposedly be stored until a more habitable environment becomes available. The narrative follows a professor of hydrological engineering, Tadgh El-Haddad, who lives in a dormitory pod in a skyscraper in South Florida. He bumbles his way into a criminal plot that takes him through the seamy underbelly of our decaying future America, replete with repurposed battle droids, digital urns, and drug dealers.
What inspired you to write the book? A particular person? An event?
The COVID-19 pandemic, and American society’s response to it, inspired me to write 21Nothing. As I witnessed the deliberate inflation of the stock market’s value, the forced return to work of a vulnerable proletariat, and a fraying of social mores, I tried to imagine the logical end result of the policies and social trends I noticed as the pandemic continued. The tendency toward exploitation that characterizes actors in my novel is the hallmark, I think, of our society today.
What’s the main reason someone should really read this book?
My book has something for everyone! The action is brisk; the chapters are short; the plot has momentum and forcefulness. At the same time, it pays homage to literary traditions such as southern gothic and cyberpunk, as well as metafiction a la Pynchon or Barth. If the entertaining and the erudite can ever rub shoulders comfortably, it might be in 21Nothing.
What’s the most distinctive thing about the main character? Who-real or fictional-would you say the character reminds you of?
The book’s main character is probably Tadgh El-Haddad. I say “probably” because there’s a real ensemble. You have Chicory Blintz, the retired battle droid, and Timeesha Levine, the government contracting official with impulse control issues. Millie Hernandez, the woman who runs the American Trucking Company’s consciousness-upload storage satellite. And there’s Dainton Head, too, the psychotic AI. But Tadgh? Well, Tadgh… He’s, um… well, he’s just kind of there. “Pure subjectivity,” as Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek describes the main character of They Live! (1988) in The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012).Tadgh is probably relatable to many readers, as he is an underpaid renter whose worries mostly revolve around his finances, which are chronically low, since his money is rapidly becoming worthless. My wife says he reminds her of Sir Gawain, played so magnificently by Dev Patel in The Green Knight (2021). I tend to agree. He is a wanderer, dear me, and traipses through the pages with a look of perennial confusion on his face (not unlike Patel’s in that movie) as he wanders, stoned as all get-out, through South Florida’s seamy underbelly.
When did you first decide to become an author?
When I was eleven I accidentally severed a tendon in my finger (I was mishandling a knife). The surgery to repair it went well and I recovered the full use of my hand soon, but it did take a few months. During that time, I was stuck inside. Before that, I had been a pretty active kid. Now, my hand was wrapped up in this weird plastic cast. So, to kill time, I started to read. The book that really got me going was The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. It was the first piece of genuine literature that I had ever encountered, and it moved me deeply. I think it was emerging from that experience, and recognizing how helpful literature had been in getting me through a difficult time in my life, that made me think, “If I ever feel like I can write a novel, I will.” One point of writing, to me, is to give someone else the gift of immersion into something other than their present cares. It took me another twenty years, almost, to get to the point where I felt that I could write.
Is this the first book you’ve written?
I wrote another book before 21Nothing. That one is called Gansfield, and it, too, will be coming out soon.
What do you do for work when you’re not writing?
These days, I work as an MCAT tutor. It’s an awesome job and I unironically like my employer.
How much time do you generally spend on your writing?
I write quickly. Generally I try to knock out between 750 and 1000 words per day, six days per week. My writing sessions take me between one and two hours. I have no particular time of day that I write.
What’s the best and the hardest part of being an indie?
The best part is having a great degree of control over what you do. For someone who is committed to their art, I think indie is the way to go. I was inspired, in my twenties, by hardcore bands like Converge – bands that did everything on their own, from songwriting to production to booking. Working with an independent publisher is kind of similar to that. It’s a hard road to travel, but it’s rewarding in that the end product is something you have total ownership of. The hardest part of being indie is getting the word out about your work. Of course, we live in an age where there is a ton of fantastic writing, so it is hard to get noticed.
What’s a great piece of advice that you can share with fellow indie authors?
I’m not very good at giving advice. But I would just say to keep writing, because I want to read more good books!
Would you go traditional if a publisher came calling? If so, why?
It’s hard for me to imagine a circumstance in which I would accept a traditional publishing deal. I did not even really seek out a traditional deal. I have constructed my life in such a way that (a) my income is not dependent on my writing and (b) my happiness is not very dependent on my income. I think that’s a good way to go about things, at least for me. Plus, working with my editor and publisher John Carney has been nothing but a pleasure. He is a true professional, a creative partner, and a good friend.
Is there something in particular that motivates you (fame? fortune?)
I am motivated solely by a desire to create and share art. 21Nothing would have been written regardless of whether it ever got published. That it has been well-received is, to me, nothing but icing on the cake. And I love cake.
Which writer, living or dead, do you most admire?
I admire Henry James. His work is timeless because it focuses so closely on social relations, with relatively little attention paid to physical details. His command of prose English remains unsurpassed, too; I am particularly fond of the way that, in his later works, he reaches for terse, Germanic words in the middle of long, elaborate, clause-laden, Romantic sentences. I also think he was one of the first writers of metafiction, a fact that, to my knowledge, remains unacknowledged in academic circles.
Which book do you wish you could have written?
I believe that Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perduis the perfect novel, so I wish I had written that. But to do that, I would have to have been Proust. I also wish I could have written my next book already!