I believe good stories are not escapist in nature, but tools for thinking. I’m drawn to speculative fiction that unravels social conventions, questions the nature of identity, and finds drama in the quiet, internal struggles of a character grappling with a world-changing idea. Action and irreverence are distractions when we could be exploring intellectual and emotional journeys.

My writing is a product of that belief. Each story I create is built upon a foundation of sociological and philosophical inquiry, inspired by those who used fiction to dissect reality, question what’s normal, and pave the way toward a better world by doing so.

This post is my attempt to trace those connections. I’ll walk you through the thematic and conceptual threads that connect my ideas to seminal books by authors like Ursula K. Le Guin and Anne Rice. Consider this a guided tour through what inspires me to write, where we’ll explore how old questions can be reimagined to speak to new anxieties.

An Interesting Solution to an Interesting Problem

When I wrote An Interesting Solution to an Interesting Problem, I was fresh off of reading Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question. It’s about a cosmic-scale problem that humanity keeps failing to solve, over and over, across eons. It got me thinking about something my partner and I believe: that once all of humanity’s basic needs are met, the whole point of life will just be intellectual play. My story is kind of a human-scale, sociological version of that. The “interesting problem” shifts from material scarcity to the search for psychological and philosophical fulfilment. Both stories are really about how humanity’s central question transforms, which suggests the act of questioning is as eternal as the need for an answer.

Also, the SolPro app in the story is basically a conceptual mirror to Borges’s The Library of Babel. Borges imagines a universe that’s a giant library containing every possible book, which means it contains both infinite knowledge and infinite nonsense. It’s about potential and futility, all at once. SolPro is like that—a near-infinite space of problems and solutions where ideas just keep building on each other. So when Zhi gives that simple, one-line answer, it’s almost like a radical act. It’s like finding a single, perfect sentence in the overwhelming noise of the Library.

Then there’s the highly amusing Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott, which uses simple geometry to talk about perception and the limits of our knowledge. Zhi’s journey is a similar kind of consciousness-expansion. They go from a “flat,” two-dimensional understanding of their work to seeing the multi-dimensional history and purpose behind it, all thanks to a mentor who comes from a “higher dimension” of understanding.

The Immortal King

I wrote The Immortal King when I was in the mood for finding inspiration from folk tales, and spent time reading through some from the Balkans. However, I wanted to write something dramatic and evocative, not entirely realistic. It ended up being more about the imagery—this caricature of a CEO versus the people who rise up against him.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest is a huge parallel here, though. We have the extractive, colonial humans seeing the forest world of Athshe as just a pile of resources, which is exactly how Omnicorp in my story views its environment. The Athsheans, who are deeply connected to their world through dream-sharing, eventually fight back in this violent, ecological resistance. It mirrors the struggle in my story, where Union 677’s kudzu could be considered an active player in the revolution, “digesting” data and rebuilding the world. It’s the idea that a truly different consciousness—the Athshean dream-time, the kudzu’s network—is fundamentally at odds with extractive capitalism.

Aesthetically, though, it’s similar to Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation. “Area X” is a place that passively, relentlessly transforms everything inside it, rewriting DNA and dissolving human stuff into alien biology. My transgenic kudzu does something similar; it’s a “silent revolution” that “liquefies walls” and rebuilds with “bio-computational coral.” Both stories have a protagonist navigating a world where nature isn’t just wild, but actively hostile to human concepts—especially ideas like ownership and hierarchy. The King’s digital ghost is like one of those corrupted “copies” left behind by Area X, just an echo of an identity being swallowed by something new.

And then there’s Paolo Bacigalupi with The Calorie Man—a classic “biopunk” where capitalism has sunk its teeth into biology itself. Corporations own patents on all food, and people trade illicit genes on the black market. The feel of my world—the “deuterium-coolant runoff,” the “neural gel leaks”—feels a lot like Bacigalupi’s grimy, corporate-owned future. Both stories are about fighting a system that has turned life into IP. Lian using “autoimmune code” to destroy the King is a direct nod to that kind of subversion—using the system’s own weaponised logic to set biology free.

The Memoir

I’m in the middle of writing a short story right now, mostly because my partner and I were talking about Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. I feel like it connects to a few other stories, though I might be reaching a little.

For example, Le Guin’s The Dispossessed could be seen as a direct thematic parallel. It contrasts a stark, collectivist society with a capitalist one. But while Le Guin’s novel does this on a huge socio-political scale, my story tries to drill down into the architecture of selfhood itself. Axon’s journey is a lot like Shevek’s, but his journey is one of perception, not space. He doesn’t travel to a new world; he’s just forced to see his own through a new, devastating lens.

It’s also possible that Lyra’s “memoir” in my story is basically the Heptapod B for Axon, like in Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life. Chiang’s story shows how learning an alien language physically rewires the brain to see time differently. Lyra’s memoir—which rejects a straight, linear narrative—does the same thing to Axon. By immersing himself in her web-like storytelling, his whole mental framework for what “identity” even means gets irrevocably scrambled for the better.

The story also shares a quiet, observational vibe with Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. Through the eyes of an “Artificial Friend,” that novel asks what it means to be human. Ishiguro’s method is to use an outsider to deconstruct human nature. Klara learns about people by watching their rituals, often missing the selfish reasons behind them. Axon, as a researcher, is a similar kind of outsider in Lyra’s world. His clinical observations slowly reveal that his own society’s rituals of individualism are just as constructed and weird as the collectivism he came to study. It leads to the same kind of quiet, internal crisis about what a “person” is.

Flames in the Night

Flames in the Night has burned in my mind for the better part of a decade—a story kindled from the embers of my own life and fanned into a fantastical blaze. The writing has been its own reward, a private exploration where the act of thinking and creating matter more than the final product. This is my most deeply personal work—a process of discovery that means far more to me than any final verdict on the work.

The biggest inspiration has been Anne Rice’s first three Vampire Chronicles books. We’re both digging into power, immortality, mentorship, secret supernatural societies, and ancient forces messing with the modern world. But where Rice is all gothic character study, my story is more of a multi-POV geopolitical thriller. It’s like I’ve tried to combine her romanticism and philosophical brooding with the pacing and stakes of a spy novel. There’s more action, more tension, and less lush, descriptive melancholy, as much as I personally enjoy that.

To go book by book, my story shares the mentor-protégé theme from Interview with the Vampire. But while Louis is this reluctant, sad philosopher, my Olivia is thrown into a much more active role. Her journey isn’t spent on brooding on eternity, but uncovering a conspiracy while trying to master a new set of predatory skills out of sheer necessity of survival.

The Vampire Lestat is where Rice pulls back the curtain on the global vampire society, but my first book kicks off with that from the get-go. The Ministry, The Trinity, the witches—it’s a deeply political, factional world which I wrote a little about here in Reflections in the Dark: Personal Growth and Ideology in Obscurity Shroud. While Lestat’s story is an autobiography explaining the past, my story is a concurrent thriller told from multiple perspectives. We don’t get the world-building from one person’s memory; we get it through the chaos of a whole cast of characters who, by the end of the first book, have all impacted each other’s lives in one way or another.

Lastly, Queen of the Damned has an ancient, primal force, Akasha, whose awakening threatens the whole supernatural order. My version of that (for now, because there’s set-up here for something coming from below in the next book), is the Ordo Persona, who are trying to trigger a catastrophic event. It’s very much an urban fantasy with potentially apocalyptic consequences for the vampires in Sydney.

Ultimately, Rice’s approach is mythic, almost religious. My approach, with its focus on financial networks, construction projects, and hackers, is grounded in a modern, almost technocratic realism. The threat isn’t just one powerful being, but a systemic manipulation of the world’s underlying structures. I suppose I’ve tried to take the epic scale of Anne Rice and fuse it with the fast-paced intrigue of a modern thriller.

Or so I hope. Time will tell.