The novel Red Dot has a history that is both long and short. It began decades ago as a ten-page story called “Shoot.” It already had a number of elements that made it into the novel: The main character was a woman then, but she did work on an automated delivery plane and “pilot” was already a minimum wage job. The story had a romantic angle—she delivers a package to a man she finds attractive. She had a best friend, Cat. And like the eventual protagonist Mardy, she was an artist trying to make it on a shoestring.
I read the story to my community-college writing class, and they got a kick out of it. I decided to develop it. Early on, I came up with the idea of the love interest having a twin. I continued on another three chapters, but then life got in the way. I came out, got a boyfriend, moved to a new town, made a new group of friends. AIDS was raging, and soon I had other things on my mind.
I had already been working on what became my debut novel, Criminals (published last year). It seemed a better match to where I was personally. It had a gay protagonist and was a suspense-driven literary novel, a comic noir of lost souls set in Japan. I got busy working on that, workshopping it, taking chapters to readings, sending it out and whatnot. While that book was making the rounds, I polished up what I had for Red Dot and brought it to a new writing group, run by a novelist who had liked Criminals.
The group’s reaction was wonderful. One guy in particular, a sci-fi fan, loved it. I could feel his excitement. I became excited. Was I onto something? The rest of the group began to weigh in. It wasn’t unanimous, but it seemed I might be. Finally, it was the workshop organizer’s turn.
He cleared his throat and launched in. He hated it. Intensely. He called it contrived and said brutal things. He wanted me to write a thoughtful, literary book, not genre fiction (although he himself writes mysteries). It was a bad, bad evening. (Others members later told me they did not expect me to come back.) I fought discouragement, but it killed my enthusiasm for the story pretty much dead.
And there it stayed for a long time. I started a mystery that petered out after about 200 pages. I wrote a memoir. I started a fourth novel, which was way too long, and took years to write and required massive amounts of research. In hindsight, it was an enormous mistake. It was more than I could pull off. “The India book,” as I came to think of it, was a historical novel, based on my parents’ lives and my early childhood years in Bombay. It had nuclear power, nuclear weapons, espionage, the impact of war on its survivors, the role of women in science, how gay people found each other in the days before not-being-beaten-to-death. Conflicts of rich and poor. War. Death, disease and dismemberment.
It became all-consuming. I spent years writing it, revising it, workshopping it, taking it to more conferences, sending it to agents, sending it to small presses, the whole deal. I had some success with it – four chapters got published in magazines as stand-alones, and plenty of agents wanted to read it and did read it – but one by one they rejected it, until I ran out entirely of agents who handle gay novels.
One day I realized this process had stopped everything else in its tracks. I wasn’t writing. What was all this effort for, if I wasn’t writing? I had to write some other book. I had to start over.
I resolved to do National Novel Writing Month—NaNoWriMo—the annual November event in which people all over the world write novels in a month. I’d never given up on Red Dot. I did not want to let that one brutal takedown stomp out something I knew was good. So I unearthed it from file cabinets and backup disks. (I found it on a Zip drive—anyone remember those?) I gave it a quick read. It had a spark, but man those four chapters were dystopian and grim. People were short on cash; the world was dirty, cold, miserable.
Why? That wasn’t what I wanted. Maybe I once had, but now I wanted to write a real gay novel, and I wanted that attraction to blossom into romance. And how about if there were an artistic rivalry? With the twin! I threw out the old pages. On November 1, I sat down and started with a blank file and a new title: Red Dot.
From day one, Red Dot flowed smoothly. The automated plane became intelligent, and now AI was part of the story. Best friend Cat turned out to be non-binary, and I soon my gay novel was an LGBTQ+ novel, populated with people like those I knew in my actual life.
Writing from scratch was exciting. I felt in control, upbeat. And the story was optimistic. I had to include climate change, but in this world that was a problem actively being solved. In this LGBTQ story, nobody at any point was going to have to worry about being abused or mistreated, and no one would spend one second agonizing over what somebody else was going to do to them. They were going to have lives, each other, and fun.
So that’s the book I wrote. I’m proud of it. I had a blast. I would describe it to writer folks and they would ask “where’s the conflict?” But with human beings, there’s never any shortage of conflict, no matter how utopian the world. So Mardy and his friends charged ahead, with plenty to keep them occupied. I hope you like the result, because I sure do.
After the disaster of global warming, the world has gotten its act together. People are positive, sensible, and intent on creating a better future and a just present. And it’s working! So, in a world where everyone makes good decisions, what could possibly go wrong?
Well, other people. Mardy is a 26-year old gay man who dreams of being a full-time machine-tool artist. He brims with ideas, puts in the hours, and has a solid circle of friends—both fellow artists and the artificial intelligences he works with. But he’s always coming in second to another machine-tool artist at his makerspace. He’s dealing with that, thanks to the highly effective psychotherapy of the future, but then he meets his irritatingly successful rival’s twin—and falls for him hard. Consequences ensue, and fast, driving Mardy not just to pursue his artistic dreams, but to try to liberate his AI friends from servitude, and find love in the process.
About the Trilogy:
Powered by art, the search for true love leads to freedom for enslaved AIs.
Publisher | Amazon
Mike is giving away a $20 Amazon gift card with this tour:
Chapter 1
Mardy’s ExMail delivery jet was vectoring in fast on San Francisco.
“Coming in a little hot, don’t you think?” he said to the plane.
“It’s fine, Mardy,” the plane replied.
Mardy gripped the open side-portal of the plane. Hoverdown would normally have engaged by that point, but there was little at the moment to distinguish their trajectory from a kamikaze run at his apartment building rooftop.
“Plane?” Mardy asked, panicking a wee bit. They were plummeting. Mardy clamped his lips against the wind. He wanted to make the designstation time he’d booked for the evening, but as much as he wanted to be a full-time machine tool artist, he’d prefer not to die in the attempt.
One hundred feet, fifty feet. Twenty.
The plane hit its thrusters hard, sending Mardy sprawling out of the portal. He managed a shoulder roll onto the hot concrete roof, ending in a crouch. His heart pounded as the impact of his landing reverberated through his bones.
His plane floated above the roof. “See you tomorrow, Mardy.”
Mardy stood. Did he detect a smirk in the plane’s voice? It maintained its hover, wheels retracted. Was it waiting for Mardy’s reaction?
“See you tomorrow,” Mardy mumbled, shaken, sweating, and not just from the sun beating down on them.
The plane waggled its wings ever so slightly. It was laughing, Mardy was sure of it. Mardy waved slowly as the plane left for who knew where. The official story was that all the delivery jets were operated by a central AI, a single intelligence. But Mardy had sensed differences between planes almost from day one and found it harder and harder to pretend he didn’t. And this plane, a jokester, was his favorite. It knew Mardy was light on his feet, able to handle the abrupt braking. It was playing with him. Mardy wanted to give it a name.
Phil.
The name popped into Mardy’s mind, unbidden. Which felt more alarming than the idea of plunging to earth through an open portal, because naming AIs was illegal—not just technically illegal, but illegal enough to land you in jail.
Mardy caught the beautifully air-conditioned elevator down the thirty-three flights to ground level, legs tired from a full day on the job, and hoofed it one block down Mission Street to WorkShop Downtown SF, sweat now dribbling from him despite the near-dusk hour. The batteries of the personal cooler strapped to his chest must have filled up from harvesting his body heat as he’d raced through his workday.
Mardy pushed through the WorkShop front door. He planned to spend an all-nighter polishing his latest machine-tooled design. It was nearly ready to submit for the salon, the competitive exhibition WorkShop held every month. Salons had only one slot per discipline and he had never been selected, but this was the month he would finally beat out their resident star, Smith Hunt. Mardy could feel it: this month, he would be the salon’s chosen machine tool artist.
He dropped his satchel next to his designstation, already feeling the hours of slogging to come.
His design was a whirligig, one of the middle genres of machine tool art. He’d been working so far in gizmos, the very bottom rung of the genres, but having failed every single month he’d competed, he’d decided more ambition was called for. His whirligig was essentially a mobile cooling fan intended to track the person it was paired with, walking after its target on tiny legs to provide continuous cooling. The best part? When the person settled, their whirligig would dance a cha-cha. It naturally wouldn’t be as convenient or effective as the personal cooling units everyone wore to survive their globally warmed world, but it would be adorable.
His best friend, Cat, a plastic surgery artist, hurried over to Mardy’s designstation, their bushy black hair bouncing. “We’re heading over to Uncle Mix for drinks.” They were dressed in work clothes—sweatshirt and jeans—except that their jeans had a starscape of Milky Way and crescent moon splashed in yellow against the dark blue denim, likely the work of one of the resident fabrics artists.
Mardy shook his head. “I haven’t finished my entry.” Plus, he really wanted to do more than design it. He wanted to build this sucker, an expensive, full realization. And on his pilot’s salary, he couldn’t afford another night out. A minimum-wage job like ExMail pilot was enough for a tidy supplement to universal basic income, but it left little room for art.
Cat bent over to look at his screen. “Show me,” they said.
“I want it to be a surprise.”
“I already know it’s a whirligig. You’ve been dropping hints for a solid month.”
“Are you submitting?” Mardy asked.
Cat cocked their head at him. “Think a question will distract me?”
Mardy chuckled. “Okay, not subtle. But your plastic surgery is so great. I really want you to submit a routine. Use me as your blank.”
Cat gave him a skeptical look.
Ever since Cat’s controversial near-triumph at Vegas Regionals last year, their plastic surgery performance recordings had gotten astonishing view metrics. Now everybody wanted to be in a Cat performance. But Mardy had shied away, despite Cat’s repeated requests and flattering remarks about his bone structure. Mardy trusted Cat’s ability to restore his face and/or other body parts afterwards, but he was afraid of knives. He’d only volunteered now to avoid showing Cat his design. But he’d said it, and if he’d said it, he’d do it.
“Done. And just to warn you, I submitted an hour ago,” Cat said.
“I’m not scared.” Mardy tried to hide a gulp of terror. “In bocca al lupo.” Over the last decade, the Italian phrase—in the mouth of the wolf—had thoroughly supplanted the nonsensical break a leg, part of a global migration of slang, as verbal fashions swarmed over the face of the planet like birds on the move.
Cat ran a finger down Mardy’s jawline, the plans for imagined cuts bubbling behind their eyes.
His goal these days is to write novels for queer audiences that are entertaining rather than esoteric, upbeat rather than angsty. His more recent shorter fiction, memoir and nonfiction (some in the more angsty vein) can be found in Tin House, Foglifter, Tahoma Literary Review, Oyster River Pages and other magazines.
Mike has roots in Texas and Estonia, and has lived in California, Michigan and Ohio, not to mention eight years in Asia in the early part of his life. Now he lives in San Francisco with his husband and dog in a house soon to be celebrating its 130th birthday. Red Dot is Mike’s second book, after Criminals (2021), and is the first in a planned trilogy.
Author Website: https://mikekarpa.com
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