They might not be raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens, but that doesn’t mean that we love them any less. Welcome back to My Favorite Things, the weekly column where we grab someone in speculative circles to gab about the greatest in geek. This week, we sit down with author Sarah Colombo, whose debut novel Subterranean was released on August 28th from Spaceboy Books!
What does Sarah love when she’s not writing about an “unsettling world of ubiquitous screens and surveillance, snarky robots and tech-resistant cults”?* Spoiler alert: the best role model, music that takes you on an emotional roller-coaster, one tough dame, a book of eerie similarities, and swoon-worthy villains. Interested? Read on to learn more!
*Bridget Erin, playwright of Sonata for Four Hands and In Our Backyard
Earliest Obsession: I was technically not allowed to watch The X-Files as a kid. It was scary, and my parents made me leave the room when it was on. One day I caught a few scenes, and I was hooked. I begged to be allowed to keep watching it and my parents caved. In late elementary and early middle school, I had a deep obsession with the show, specifically with Dana Scully, who I wanted to be. I was 100% sure that I was going to become an FBI agent. I dyed my hair red and wore “suits” (really just like a button-down blouse with a collar) and signed my name Sarah “Scully” Colombo on notes and in yearbooks. One year, my dad made me personalized birthday invitations — the kind in Microsoft Word that you have to fold 4 times to make a card — that said: “The party’s out there.” I never really thought about it until tasked with writing this piece, but there is really no cooler role model to have as a young girl: a smart doctor FBI agent who also gets to learn about aliens and hang out with some goofy guy and tell him he’s wrong all the time!
Song about the Future: As a writer, John Prine is one of my storytelling heroes. His songs are strange and sad and funny all at the same time. I feel like I will only be artistically satisfied when I successfully take my readers on the same type of emotional roller-coaster a Prine album takes me on. 
“Living in the Future” is, as the title suggests, about life in the future, and much like the best works of speculative fiction it portrays it as something exciting and shiny and also sad and disappointing:
We are living in the Future
I’ll tell you how I know
I read it in the paper
15 years ago.
And we’re all driving rocket ships
And talking with our minds
And wearing turquoise jewelry
And standing in soup lines.
Now 71, Prine is still speculating about the future in his latest album. A lovely song called “The Lonesome Friends of Science,” is more of a shrug to it all, featuring a sad and lonely Pluto who got “uninvited to the Interplanetary ball.” Prine isn’t too concerned about scientific trajectories because he “don’t live here anyway”:
Those bastards in their white lab coats
Who experiment with Mountain Goats
Should leave the Universe alone
It’s not their business… not their home
Favorite Spouse to A Person who Emerged from a Wall Socket: Janey-E.
Copyright: Showtime
I’ve always had a strange mash up of tastes and any piece of art that manages to put them together into one thing is like magic to me. I love a small-town story. Anyone who knows me would know that on a list of non-speculative based favorite things, it would just be Gilmore Girls. I’m a sucker for a central meeting place, quirky community members, and a little romance. I also love paranoia, mystery, and absurdity. So yes the original Twin Peaks with all of its quaintness, Bobby and Shelley-ness, and Cooper going on about pie and coffee is one of my favorite things, but Twin Peaks: The Return turned it all up a thousand notches. We lost a little of the hometowniness as we were taken all over the place: to see a weird glass box in New York, to wherever the hell Audrey was supposed to be, to a trailer park just outside of town (I know, exciting!), but we got even more weirdness, with much of this revolving around Dougie Jones in his green suit. The breakout hit of the entire series in my opinion was Janey-E, Dougie’s devoted wife who doesn’t blink an eye when he wraps a tie around his head, repeats everything she says, and doesn’t seem to know how to get to work. She just fixes his shit. Dougie’s being shaken down by some gangsters? Who cares? Janey-E will gladly go to the park in her “cheap, terrible car” and take care of those gangsters and tell them just what a couple of assholes they are. Naomi Watts is amazing in this role and manages to pull off something’s we rarely see: a strong-willed, not so nice, bossy woman who isn’t portrayed as some annoying killjoy but as the person who is taking care of business. She’s a tough dame.
No One Knows This is Even Science Fiction: Recently, a friend of mine was reading an advanced copy of my first novel Subterranean, and he texted to tell me that he wanted me to read Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, then promptly brought me his copy of the book. I feel flattered that anything in my work reminded him of Stella Gibbon’s book, and at first was a bit miffed as to what similarities he saw between a book set in the near future featuring companion robots and alien cults, and a book about an orphan who goes to live on a farm. I’m still not sure there are many similarities, but something I was shocked to find as I read Cold Comfort Farm is that it is technically speculative fiction.
Gibbons published the book in 1932 but it is set after the “Anglo-Nicaraguan wars of 1946.” It randomly features technology such as a telephone with a screen. These small details are not remotely important to the plot, and I have no idea why Gibbons decided to place them there. I use science fiction as a framework to explore human nature and all the basic stuff art likes to explore: love, friendship, self, etc. You could just have a person exploring all that stuff in a hyper-real setting, or you can throw in some robots and a cult at Walden Pond to push the characters and test assumptions. In Gibbons case, she threw in private airplanes and videophones.
Villains: I love villains. In my book Subterranean, the “bad guy” Johns is one of my favorite characters, because he does so much bad stuff but man, sometimes you feel something for him, and you’re wondering how am I feeling something for this bad person? Hello empathy!
It’s hard to pick just 3, but here are my top 3 favorite villains:
- Killmonger: Michael B. Jordan can do no wrong in my eyes, so I was a pretty easy sell on this one, but HELLO. He has everything you need in a good villain: good looks and layers. The writers did an excellent job of teaching us not to judge a villain by all the things he blows up. The scene where he gets buried and goes back to his childhood is a powerful narrative feat, the cut between him as an innocent, fragile child who just lost his dad to a crying, frustrated grown man is a magic trick of character building in just a few frames.
- Kylo Ren: Everyone I know hated The Last Jedi, but I spent the whole time feeling the same fluttery feeling I get when I watch a good rom-com. Rey gets to communicate telepathically with this beautiful, shirtless man? I’m all in. Also Luke tried to kill him when he was a kid? That’s messed up. I can’t get over that hopeful look he gets on his face when he asks Rey to join him. Who really cares what he’s up to?
- Spike: Wonderful, beautiful Spike. You were my first. You had me at that time you went to Buffy’s house to shoot her and then sat down on the porch next to her instead because she was sad.
Sarah Colombo lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Subterranean is her first novel.
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