The Big Idea: A. T. Sayre
Posted on February 25, 2025 Posted by Athena Scalzi
Sometimes you aim to write a novel, and sometimes you don’t but end up doing exactly that anyways. Such is the case with author A. T. Sayre, who wound up with a novel on accident. Follow along in his Big Idea to see just how The Last Days of Good People came to be.
A. T. SAYRE:
The Last Days of Good People is my first novel. And was completely unintentional. An accident, if you will. I won’t get into exactly how I came to accidentally write a novel (if interested you can read about that here), but sufficed to say this story is basically a novelette that kinda got away from me. Which is nothing new; I am ridiculously bad at estimating how long something I’m writing is going to be. I don’t think I’ve ever accurately estimated the length of any story I have ever written. I always underestimate. Sometimes, as in this case, by quite a lot. Some might think it’s because I have so much to say. But those who know me will tell you it’s because sometimes I just won’t shut the fuck up.
That’s not a knock on this book, just the doofus who wrote it. Because I think the story is exactly the length it needs to be. And is, in my obviously biased opinion, very good. I don’t seem to be alone in that thinking, either. The response I’ve received for this as well as the previous iteration of this novel that appeared in Analog last summer has been surprisingly positive. The fact that it was even in such a high quality publication as Analog to start with, never mind published now on its own says something in and of itself.
There are a lot of ideas in this book. Some of them have been floating around in the soup in my head for years, just waiting for a premise they could latch onto. The applications are not exact; ideas evolve over the years, and also have to adapt to fit in the story, but I can still clearly see where a lot of them came from. The ethics and morality of non-interference concepts like Star Trek’s Prime Directive have been in my brain ever since I first watched the third season TNG episode The High Ground over thirty years ago. And the idea of a species so suited to their environment that societal advancement effectively stalls with them, came from things I’ve read and seen about some of the ancient hominid species that lived for hundreds of thousands of years, some a million or more, in relative prosperity—yet as suited as they were for their environment they were ultimately evolutionary dead-ends and never went anywhere. Those and other ideas, from the big to the small, the political to the philosophical, found safe harbor in this story after being adrift in my noggin, a few of them for longer than some people who will read this novel have been alive.
But the big idea in this book, the one that I feel holds all the rest together, wasn’t something that I’ve had in my head forever; not exactly, at least. When I first put down the opening lines of this one, there were vague hints of the idea, a certain grasp of it, but nothing so specific—not until I was neck deep into it. Then the idea refined itself and clarified for me, became concrete somewhere near the end of the first draft. That happens a lot with the big idea of a story in my experience. Its not so much there at the beginning. Maybe its safely hidden away in the subconscious, secretly pulling your strings. Or maybe it forms while you’re distracted with getting the opening of chapter nine just right. Who knows? It’s a surprisingly difficult moment to pinpoint. All you know is that one day you’re at your desk typing away like crazy, and you stop and look up from the keyboard and there it is, the big idea, eating chips and lounging on the couch as if it had always been there.
The big idea behind The Last Days of Good People is about trying to manage in a universe that you have no real control over. And can seem pretty damn malicious. Let’s be clear—the universe is not out to get you, has no animosity toward you. It barely registers your existence. But that doesn’t mean it won’t squish you underfoot like an ant on the garden path. And a single person’s ability to do anything about it a lot of the time is negligible.
What do you do when faced with an unavoidable tragedy? Do you turn away? Do you rationalize it, try to justify it? Do you get performative, point fingers, yell and scream, do the philosophical equivalent of demanding to speak to the manager? Do you ‘burn it all down’ in a fit of petty anger? Or do you plant your feet, make a stand, fight against the unavoidable outcome, and when you inevitably fail, as you absolutely know you will, keep going, and try to mitigate the damage as best you can?
This is the situation faced by the characters in this book, and they all react differently, from the apathetic to the extreme. And it’s how they respond to tragedy that defines them. As it does for each of us with the tragedies and catastrophes in the real world. Bad things happen all the time. Sometimes you can stop them, or help stop them. Most times you can’t. You don’t have the power, you don’t have the numbers, you don’t have the will, you didn’t even see there was a problem or decide to do something about it until it was too late.
Yeesh. Even I think that’s pretty bleak. But that doesn’t make it any less true. And it’s how you respond to those moments when you are powerless that matter. I actually think they matter more than when you can affect change because it’s easy to be noble when you win. Doing what you think is right when no one is watching and you know it’s pointless, that’s what I call real character.
That what I think the big idea here is, at least.
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