Lilith Saintcrow: Five Things I Learned Writing Coyote Run

In the first Amazing Tale of Antifascist Action, New York Times bestselling author Lilith Saintcrow serves up science fiction pulp in a North America fractured by drones, bioweapons, and ideology, giving us a heroine practically made out of violent resistance.

THE RUNNER

Just behind the front lines of a war they call “civil,” the shifter called Coyote is tough, fast, ugly—and known for taking jobs nobody else will.

THE JOB

Marge’s sister is locked in a prison camp civilians shouldn’t know about, deep in enemy territory. Rescuing her will take a plan made of weapons-grade insanity.

THE TRICK

To get in, all Coyote has to do is get caught.

THE PAYOFF

None, unless the satisfaction of killing an old enemy counts. And maybe a few small bounties from murdering fascist clones…

RUN, COYOTE. RUN.

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Apparently I’ve read a lot of “pulp”.

When Kevin Hearne at Horned Lark first contacted me about writing a novella, one of the terms tossed around was pulp, which as a genre is almost impossibly fluid. To be pulp is like being porn—one knows it when one sees it, a gestalt of violence, unrestrained cover art, and over-the-top-ness. All of which I’m a great fan of! When I started thinking seriously about the story on a structural level, I was forced to think about what I love in things I personally consider “pulp.” I wanted a fast-moving, lean, incredibly unflinching story; I wanted Coyote to be just as quick, canny, and resourceful as her namesake. I drew from a wide variety of pulp-ish works, from Bugs Bunny to Weird Tales, from Action Comics to spinning paperback racks, from dime thrillers to thinly veiled 50s erotica.

Truth be told, I was kind of shocked by how many books, novellas, old magazines, short stories I considered “pulp” enough to influence what I wanted to do. I hadn’t thought it was so much a part of my personal aesthetic, but I guess one learns things about oneself with every work finished or even attempted. I mean, I already know I’m a midlist hack schlockster, but this just drove home how much I adore things many “serious” writers or “critics” find disposable, nasty, crude, over-the-top, et cetera, ad nauseum, ad infinitum.

Tropes exist to be flipped, reinvented, and put in whatever blender you can find.

Coyote is not a character for the male gaze, which is in itself an inversion of plenty of what’s considered “pulp”—especially given the history of the term. My feelings on tropes are like my feelings on grammar or punctuation; these things exist as rules so a writer can figure out how and why to break them for whatever effect is necessary. I have rarely met a trope I didn’t want to flip, dismantle, chop to pieces, or subvert, either subtly or overtly.

I admit it doesn’t get much more overt than Coyote.

Anyway, these tactics can’t be deployed without an understanding of why tropes exist, what they are, and how they are generally used. It’s like resistance training for physical muscles—performed improperly, it turns into an injury-prone mess. But if you know how a muscle works, you know how to stress it in a way that adds to strength or flexibility. One can even obey a trope in such a way that it adds to subversion, as in the figure of Doctor Deranian (incidentally, named after a millionaire Disney villain) whose fictional experiments are taken almost directly from gruesome real-life historical incidents. Pulp villains are not terribly complex, and yet Deranian is not merely two-dimensional because he is taken from actual people who behaved just as he does.

Using cartoonish, exaggerated broad strokes to highlight the banality of real-world evil is a highly satisfying way to use a trope. Sometimes evil is just that, and deserves to be met with its own nasty methods.

Art can (and does) come from spite and pettiness.

Quite some time ago, I wrote another book with an “ugly” (i.e., considered unattractive by the conventional male gaze) protagonist, and my one request of the publisher was not to put a bee-sting-lipped model on the cover.

Guess what happened.

Anyway, it’s been years and I’m still annoyed whenever I think about it, despite being in the game for a very long time and understanding the various pressures which lead to many, many unfortunate cover-art decisions in publishing. However, being handed the chance to write another stereotypically “ugly” character (don’t get me started on the term coyote ugly, which was a factor in the story’s genesis) and also have my request that an artist go absolutely apeshit with the cover honored was a pretty healing experience. (Please go take a look at Phineas X. Jones’s absolutely excellent work here, my friends!)

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still spiteful and petty. That will likely never change. It’s a major source of fuel for any work, and leaning into it is not only instructive but provides a great deal of amusement for one personally as an artist.

Christ knows we need all the sardonic, spiteful chuckles we can find these days.

Biology is weirder than anything I could ever dream up.

Mother Nature is not only drunk but high, and has been on the bender for billions of years. The number of weird animal facts I dug up while researching to answer questions of imaginary shapeshifter physiology cannot be calculated. I started out with the well-documented instances of cooperation between coyotes and badgers, fell into a rabbit hole about conversion-of-mass in possible shapeshifter thermodynamics and metabolism, took a sideways journey through chemical cascades underlying certain physiological responses, learned more about snake hemi-penises than I thought possible (though truth be told writing shapeshifter romance is a thorough education in Different Animal Dicks almost by default), staggered into another research hole dealing with the maternal stress response of eating one’s own young, on and on—and that was just writing the initial draft of the damn story!

If I detailed every research hole I threw myself down while revising—or during copyedits—we’d be here forever. Just take my word for it, Ma Nature has been intoxicated to the point of incoherence for geologic aeons, and the results are diversely, stunningly hilarious. Especially on this tiny, rocky little planet of ours. So lean into the weird with your biology, my fellow writers.

You won’t be able to approach Ma Nature’s sheer bonkers bullshit, but it’s fun to try.

Any story about “the future” tells us more (most) about RIGHT NOW.

I was first forcibly shown this while writing the Danny Valentine series, where a major influence was my trying to imagine how a post-petroleum transport technology might affect social structures, especially the repression of those seen as “different”. The HOOD series was informed by the question of how FTL travel and generation ships might intersect with feudalistic, autocratic social structures. Afterwar also drew on a lot of thinking I’d done about post-petroleum. So does Coyote; the Lindyland clinging to petroleum in the presence of other, better energy sources is clearly a comment on today’s stupid, short-sighted “drill, baby, drill”.

I am reminded of a (possibly apocryphal) story about Gene Rodenberry being asked if replicator technology was what ushered in Star Trek’s post-scarcity society. Rodenberry was reportedly quite definite that post-scarcity had already been reached, otherwise replicator technology would have been kept as a plaything of the already-rich and powerful while the rest of humanity starved.

Technology aside, there’s a larger point: Imagining a future must necessarily start in the present, pushing against the boundaries of what exists in order to show what is possible (and in many cases, preferable). The futures we imagine as ways to solve present problems are built in reaction to the structures which make present problems, well, problems. This is why autocrats, dictators, fascists, and bigots come for the storytellers first, with book bans, blacklisting, starvation, and finally bullets. Exposing racism, sexism, oligarchy, greed, etc. as problems to be solved instead of how things will always be is incredibly powerful, and strikes at the root of the rotten house of lying cards.

Imagining a better, kinder, more free and equitable future cannot happen without taking stock of (and holding a mirror up to) what exists now, and is never more critical than when the present is a morass of lies, fascism, and violence.

And if you like pulp, well, you can also have some deliriously violent fun along the way. Heaven (and binge-drunk Mother Nature) knows I did.

Coyote Run is available now in print, ebook, and audio in all the places, including your library if you request it.

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Lilith Saintcrow is the New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty novels. She resides in the rainy Pacific Northwest with her children, dogs, cat, and library for wayward texts. 

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Lilith Saintcrow: Website

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