Interview with Cairo Smith
Author of Quarter Lives and Editor of Futurist Letters
Editor’s Note:
In conversation with P3 contributor and novelist
, author and filmmaker reflects on his career, his superb short story collection Quarter Lives, and the influences that have informed his art. Smith is the Editor of , a Substack publication showcasing some of the most riveting and genre-bending short stories available.Enjoy!
- Frank Theodat
Frank: Hi Cairo, thanks for agreeing to do this interview. For those reading, this interview originally started off with an advanced copy of your new short story collection Quarter Lives and a request to review it. However, I was about halfway through reading it, when I realized that I would really just prefer to pick your brain. All that to say, I was fairly impressed by most of the stories, and quite enjoyed them, with Hunters, Network States, and Locked In being my favorites.
But before we dive into some of the stories, I'd like to ask you a few icebreakers. The first being, what are your three favorite movies and what one movie do you think is criminally under-appreciated or misunderstood?
Cairo: Hey Frank. I'm honored. Glad that we could do this. I'm not surprised by the ones you called out. They are the punchiest, I would say, which is one reason they're near the top. There's kind of a harder side and a softer side to the collection, as people will discover.
I would be completely unable to answer this question if I didn't keep tabs on my movie watching, but thankfully I do. I've got a small pantheon of favorites. If I have to whittle it to three, I would start with The Apartment, which is just a perfect comedy romance. I would also add There Will Be Blood, which is the best character study I've ever seen, and In the Mood for Love, which is absolutely, undeniably sexy and profound.
For criminally underappreciated and misunderstood, I would have to say Showgirls. We actually ran an essay on this a while ago in Futurist Letters, although the essay was so tongue-in-cheek that I think it might risk leaving people more confused than before they started it. Without any irony, though, I will say Paul Verhoeven is my favorite director of all time, and Showgirls is a genius piece.
Frank: I did notice that there were two sides to the collection, a harder and softer side. At first I thought it was a bit counterintuitive to build a collection like that, but after reading it, I thought it helped pace the whole thing and give a nice emotional variety. Non-stop weirdness or thrills can get a bit tiresome. More wholesome breaks like Spirit of ‘87 were appreciated.
Was that done on purpose or was it a happy byproduct of what was available to be published?
Regrettably, I've not seen any of the movies mentioned, save for There Will Be Blood. Which I do agree, fantastic movie, and a fantastic character study. I like asking that question because I think it's a good way to get a sense of who someone is and what influences them. Especially, when getting into guilty pleasures movies or misunderstood masterpieces (Ad Astra for me).
It's also funny that you call out Verhoeven as your favorite director. I feel like I would be remiss if I didn't draw a connection between his sensibilities and the story Hunters. Can I ask what kind of inspired Hunters? It is undoubtedly a weird and off putting story, but one that I thought about off and on for a few days after. I also thought it was a bold choice to open the collection with it, and even more bold to write in the first person.
Cairo: There was definitely an attempt to create a bit of a balance with the collection. I did the same thing with my previous collection. I would say about half of the available stories I had made it into this one. The other half either didn’t fit or were outside the range of tones that I wanted.
I kind of approached the order like you would an album, where you can adjust someone’s mood and expectations going into one story based on the story that came before.
I can’t say that Verhoeven was a conscious point of reference for Hunters, although he definitely deals with sex, violence, and the American identity, which are all themes in that story. I guess if I had to draw a connection, it would probably be to Hollow Man, although, again, if there was any comparison, it wasn’t intentional.
I agree with what you say about it being a bit of a risky choice as the first story in the collection. When the book debuted, some AI at Amazon actually flagged it as erotica, probably just because of keywords in the text, and I had to appeal to customer service to get them to classify the collection correctly. That was a little harrowing.
I was also a little unsure about writing it in the first person, again because my natural inclination is to keep some distance between somebody as unpleasant as that protagonist and myself. But I thought the story was better served in the first-person voice, and ultimately, I serve the interests of the story.
Frank: I appreciated the first person approach to Hunters. As a writer, it's always interesting to see how others solve technical problems or what decisions they make. I think I might've chickened out on writing that first person. I did want to comment on the metaphysics of the story, as in, the portrayal of Glycon, the Roman Snake God. I appreciated how you made his presence felt via the actions of the characters, without ever really going any further than that.
Moving on, Locked In is probably the pulpiest story in this collection and feels like something Phillip K. Dick or Robert Heinlein would write if they were alive and watching Ukrain drone videos on X. It was also the first story of yours I'd ever read, and made me an immediate fan. But where in the world did the idea for "suicide by flashing light pattern" come from? And do you have any plans to expand the setting into a novel?
Cairo: I respect both PKD and Heinlein a lot, so that is very high praise. I remember you reaching out to me after you first read it, and that really stuck with me. Kind words like that, especially from other writers, are one of the biggest things that keep me going. I’m sure you understand.
The idea of the light pattern that kills you was one of those things that came out of being online and watching the way the Internet has been changing over the past few years. Specifically, there was some sort of political fight going on on Twitter around the time it was becoming X. There was a guy, some sort of liberal commentator, who was battling anonymous accounts, and it became known somehow that he was epileptic. Someone sent him a GIF that was supposed to be seizure-inducing, and his account responded with something like: “This is his wife. He had a seizure. I hope you’re happy. I’m telling the police.”
Now, whether or not that was true, I don’t know, but it got me thinking about the idea of cognitive vulnerabilities—ways that someone could be physically attacked through the Internet—and what that could mean. This was also a time when people were wondering if LLMs were going to become so smart so fast that they could essentially persuade a human being into doing anything, just by virtue of their super intelligence. It’s this idea of what human vulnerability will look like in the face of unfathomable technology.
Obviously, there’s the matter of human vulnerability to the drone, and so vulnerability to a killer light pattern was just another extension of this. The idea was that some sort of advanced intelligence could be good enough at mapping the brain and understanding human cognition that it could create a pattern that has the same effect as a strobe light on an epileptic person—but for everyone.
It’s perhaps also an extreme metaphor for the kind of content, like gore and torture videos, that can travel around online and cognitively harm the people who see it—although not to the point of literal death.
That’s a long answer, sorry, but I guess there was a lot that went into it. Also, just from a story mechanics perspective, you need to get pretty creative. If you have a duel between a guy on the battlefield and a drone operator sitting dozens of miles away at a computer screen, how do you give the guy on the battlefield a chance to reach the person behind the screen? This was one way to approach that.
I think the setting definitely has enough meat for a novel, and considering the interest that the short story got, I may well get around to expanding it one of these days. We’ll just have to see. I have a lot of different things I want to write.
Frank: That's awesome, and I definitely do understand how far a kind word can go. Plenty of folks on here, yourself included, have been similar motivation. It's possibly the most valuable thing Substack facilitates, but it's such a second order effect that no one seems to really hone in on it.
But dang, I can't believe I missed the lore with regards to the epileptic on X. It's a bit harder to come up with speculative technology now than it was back in Dick or Heinlein's day, but that might be a skill issue. Regardless, I thought you hit a home run. Especially, because this isn't really a sci-fi story, so the technology itself had to feel contemporary and plausibly coexist with killer drones and current technology.
I'm also glad you mentioned the story-mechanics, because that is something I really appreciated. A lot of fiction is a magic trick, in that it only works if the "trick" or the "mechanics" are sufficiently obfuscated.
Taking a wider view of the collection, there is an obvious theme of the contemporary quarter-life crisis, but I think all the stories actually hone in on the root cause of this ennui. Hunters, Network States, Spirit of 87, and even From the Branch all deal with characters trying to regain something from prior generations that they've never had, whether that be a god, larping WW2, a ghost boy, or childhood's that are free of psychiatric intervention. The stories all speak to living in a world that has progressed faster than we've learned not to be human. As far as zoos go, modernity seems pretty poorly designed to maximize human fulfillment. Do you agree with this take? Or do you think it's something else that plagues us?
Cairo: I agree with everything you just said, even though I wouldn't have said it that way myself. I think that's pretty astute. I think we're all suffering a sort of future shock that is so universal, we almost don't notice it. My friend ARX-Han writes about why it's so hard to write good science fiction now, and it's essentially because the world is already science fiction. So where do you even go from here as a speculative author? I do think a lot of these characters are trying to turn the clock back, which obviously you can't. A friend of mine referred to my work once as neo-modernist, as in trying to reclaim the sense of modernity of the early 20th century. I don't disagree with him either.
Frank: That's an interesting take. Neo-modernist. I think that sums up what I was getting at nicely.
You and ARX-Han have both written some about the term "New Wave," as applied to writers that fall outside of what is considered mainstream. For those reading that aren't familiar with the term, would you mind expanding on what you see as the "New Wave" and how you see it evolving?
Cairo: Sure, I guess New Wave at its most basic is just a group of 10-30 novelists who are relatively friendly to each other and bounce ideas and inspiration off each other as they write. There was recently a piece by Sam Kriss about Alt Lit, which I really don't think is a good name for what he's talking about. I would say what he wrote about would more accurately be described as Dimes Square fiction, but he didn't seem to want to say the words Dimes Square. Whatever you call it, the New York scene is a lot more about cocaine and polyamory and trust funds or whatever. New Wave by comparison is a little more rooted in genre fiction and being a bright, industrious guy outside the traditional heart of publishing. Halo and Monster. Esoteric texts and greentexts. It sort of spans generations, and it's mostly just about a vibe. I think what it means will continue to evolve as the movement, or social group, or whatever you want to call it, progresses.
The one thing all of these movements have in common is that they recognize publishing is held in a dying cold by people who are out of touch with and resistant to the younger and more dynamic art scenes coming up out of the woodwork. The future currently does not seem to be major publishing houses.
Frank: I think there's power in how politically impure it's remained, as in it's not just dissident lit, which it seems the New Wave has sort of avoided being pigeonholed as. I think all art comes from a place of disagreeability, at least on some level, which means nothing can kill a movement faster than a purity spiral. Trad publishing is just not what it used to be. I am Jack's corporate KPI's and all that. So it's good to see people creating, and writing, and experimenting, mostly in the hopes of doing something fresh.
You mention greentexts, and esoteric texts—your story Network States tries (and succeeds) in capturing the extremely, and terminally online era we live in. It might be my favorite story in the collection, and is obviously very experimental. What did you find most challenging about writing it? And did it take as much WW2 research as it felt like it did?
The other thing I have noticed, is there seems to be a blending of forms among a lot of New Wave writers, as in the line between literature and genre fiction and even pulp has gotten murkier. Do you think there's a future in that sort of blending?
Cairo: Yeah, I’m certainly not interested in being part of an artistic movement built around a narrow political mission. Inevitably, there will be aspects that don’t represent everyone involved, and that just sounds like a recipe for drama. Even if there were a movement that somehow perfectly aligned with every single one of my beliefs, I would find that a little creepy. I also don’t think I’m infallible, so I wouldn’t want to pursue those aims with too much didactic confidence. There’s value in exploring the nature of problems within a work and letting the answers emerge organically. Sometimes, answers arise in your work that you didn’t even know were there, and if you had gone in trying to be prescriptive, they never would have had the chance to surface.
I didn’t find writing Network States to be challenging at all, actually. It came together very quickly, and it came from a place of joy—mostly because I was writing about my actual hobbies, a video game I really play, and communities similar to ones I’ve actually encountered. It definitely required a lot of research, but most of that was just synthesized through years of reading books, Wikipedia pages, and playing games out of sheer enjoyment. So I guess it’s kind of a “write what you know” situation.
I definitely don’t think there’s a hard line between literary fiction and genre fiction in the New Wave. I think we’re all trying to fully embody both at once. Part of the beauty of that is the fact that there’s no mass market dictating what we write, so we’re not beholden to market concerns. If you’re a Marvel movie writer, you have a very narrow set of constraints because you need to avoid alienating China, India, the Midwest—you have to provide a kind of comfort food that checks specific boxes.
But now imagine someone living hundreds of years in the future, in a world where nobody has ever heard of or cares about Marvel movies. They decide to do their own spin on the superhero genre purely out of a niche historical interest. In that world, they can do whatever they want, and if it’s good, it will still find an audience. The people interested in these older forms tend to have a historical and intellectual curiosity that makes them open to more avant-garde choices. I think it’s similar to how a lot of us are playing with mid-century genre fiction thematically—no one minds if we mix it with new and reinvented elements, so we get to experiment and play. After all, “literary” just means high-quality prose that is intellectually interesting.
Frank: Genre fiction getting something of literary style facelift and getting opened up to experimentation is something I am excited for. In my opinion, it's the next obvious frontier in fiction.
I have a couple more questions, and then I think we can close this out. Of the collection, which story is nearest to your heart or a personal favorite? And then lastly, what are you working on currently, and what do your plans for the future look like?
Cairo: It's hard for me to pick a favorite. The one closest to my heart is probably "Spirit of '87," just because I relate to both characters so much. It's funny, you can't help be a little extra proud of them when you hear them getting praise from people. It's not just a question of how much you like them personally, it's also a question of how much joy they bring into the world.
I have a new novel, Calinitia Dreaming, coming out on March 15th. It's a pulp noir adventure with some fantasy elements. It's been very much inspired by the talent of some of the people I've met in this scene, including yourself.
I'm always working on more manuscripts and trying to get films off the ground. I have a short film that's a bit of a stylish, low-budget thriller that we shot last year that should be coming around to festivals pretty soon. Hopefully that'll be a good chance to meet some of these internet people in person if we come to a city near you.
Frank: I very much enjoyed the Spirit of '87. It was nostalgic and somehow very relatable. I think it tapped into several unique anxieties that most people have felt in some form or another, even if subconscious. Dying and being trapped as a ghost is an existential fear of mine and I have no idea where it came from. I'm sure a shrink or a priest would love to get a hold of that tidbit. Regardless, the resolution to that story was very sweet, and it warmed my stony heart.
I just looked up Calanitia Dreaming, and that looks like an insta buy. Also, if any of these film festivals happen to be in the middle of the country, I may very well be inclined to pop in.
Again Cairo, thank you for agreeing to do this. It has been a pleasure and I can't wait to see what comes next.
Cairo: That's my dad's favorite of the collection, and maybe my mom's as well.
Thanks for doing this, and looking forward to hearing your thoughts on Calinitia Dreaming. It was a fun one to write.
