introducing LOCAL HEAVENS 🪐✨

A queer cyberpunk retelling of a classic American novel

Dear reader,

If you’re reading this in your inbox, then you’re one of the first to be in on the secret.

LOCAL HEAVENS, the book I’ve been furiously writing for the past year, is a queer cyberpunk retelling of a classic twentieth-century novel—yes, that one from your high school English classroom. (Much to no one’s surprise, I’m sure.)

I documented the drafting, querying and revision journey of LOCAL HEAVENS, and soon it’ll be going on submission. Gearing up for sub is both exciting and extremely nerve-wracking. I never quite prepared myself for how strange it would feel to let go of something I’ve held close for years. Many books don’t make it past this stage and though I’m proud of how far we’ve come, I’m equally terrified of what lies ahead.

But for right now, while I still have one final moment before the book is placed into the hands of the universe, I want to bring you into this moment alongside me—to share with you why I chose to write this retelling. Why, indeed, I chose a retelling at all.

If you’ve been to Gatsby’s parties before, whether you loved them or hated them, I’d like to humbly invite you again.

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On world-building for Local Heavens.

Like most writers who step into this genre, I wear my inspirations on my sleeve. I love cyberpunk and have always wanted to put my own spin on classic concepts like cyberspace, netrunning, and body mods.

At the same time, you can love something and still want more things out of it. That’s sort of been my relationship with cyberpunk, particularly as a female South-East Asian diaspora writer. (I won’t go into techno-orientalism in this post because then we’d be here forever.)

Writing a Gatsby retelling meant setting the book in (a secondary world version of) New York City but I still felt a strong urge to touch upon unconscious biases around South-East Asia—to suggest a cyberpunk future where the global South is present, isn’t characterized by poverty, and the West isn’t the number one beacon of global progress.

Most of all, there is a strong critique of capitalism that arises so naturally here. As much as I love the visual aesthetic of neon lights and gritty cities, I knew that entering this space as a writer, I was first and foremost drawn to write a story about class and technology. I feel cyberpunk is one of the best vehicles to do so in spec fiction.

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Our dreams. Our nightmares.

I graduated into the pandemic and during this tumultuous time, I came to realize I didn’t believe anymore in the corporate ladder “hustle & grind” mentality that was sold to me early in life. I had to reckon with the fact that I couldn’t allow a corporate career to define my worth as a person, and similar to many in my generation, I struggled to make sense of this growing disillusionment.

I wrote the first draft of this book from Sept 2022 to May 2023, but I technically first developed the idea for ‘cyberpunk Gatsby’ back in 2020, precisely around the time that I was feeling helpless about my career and my shifting values. I started reflecting on the connections between technology and the cost of living crisis, the housing crisis, parasocial relationships and so many other pertinent issues.

At the time, I wasn’t mature enough as a writer to articulate my ideas or to mould it into a plot. Also, The Great Gatsby was still months away from being in public domain. So I wrote half of a messy draft, shelved it, wrote two completely different manuscripts, and returned to the premise two years later as a better writer. Then I burned that old draft to the ground and rewrote it.

That’s when I began to extend these issues, and others, toward darker places, shaping them in the context of a late-stage capitalist, tech-driven dystopia. I wanted to capture an atmosphere akin to a dark, romantic Black Mirror episode. One that explores the horrors of technology, just as much as the beautiful potential of it too.

It’s our world, but it isn’t—a world filled with our most irresistible dreams, and also, our worst nightmares.

The “timelessness” of the Great American Novel.

Fitzgerald is one of my favourite writers. Each time I’d reread Gatsby, I’d find new things I hadn’t noticed before, and as I grew up, I liked the book more on every read through. The toxicity of all the characters, the bright lights and the music, the hope and the heartbreak.

Stripping Gatsby down its core, it felt to me like a cyberpunk retelling was begging to be written. The book parallels themes which are inherent to cyberpunk—the whims of the rich, and the consequences of their carelessness and greed.

When I sat down to draft LOCAL HEAVENS, I read a lot of Fitzgerald’s other work as part of my ‘vocal training’. I wanted to craft a Nick Carraway that felt true to the spirit of the original Nick, but also tangibly different from the outset.

The richness of Fitzgerald’s voice is what draws you deep into Gatsby’s champagne parties. It’s a voice that convinces you that maybe magic really does exist inside of his mansion. I worried about how the remnants of the Jazz Age would translate into a sci-fi setting.

But when a book is bestowed the descriptor of ‘timeless,’ it means that it can—literally—stand the test of time. So I wondered: how timeless is it, really? Could it be launched a century and a half away from the 1920s?

Science-fiction is often defined as being extrapolative (“here is an issue taken to its logical conclusion under xyz circumstances”). This is true of LOCAL HEAVENS, but also, my approach was to suspend the story above a “real” time period—to hold the past and the future side-by-side, in the same breath. I liked the idea of creating a surreal, old-century nostalgia, and simultaneously, you have flying cars and mind-bending virtual realities and high-tech corporate crimes.

I still had a lot of doubts, so it shocked me when I sent the first act of the book to my friend Kelley one day, and after reading it, she said: “I kept asking myself: was The Great Gatsby not a cyberpunk world this whole time?”

I couldn’t believe it. It was probably the first time that I realized someone besides me might care to read this.

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The Nick Carraway challenge.

A lot of people come away from Gatsby feeling like Nick is either bland, ignorant, or in some cases, straight up lying to his reader. It can make him unlikeable, but I’ve always found him fascinating.

Image credit: Whiskey at Las Brujas VII by Fabian Perez.

In The Great Gatsby, he adopts the role of passive observer. There’s a natural inclination, therefore, to retell the story from another character’s point of view, but I just couldn’t be tempted away from him because I felt like he still had so much more to say. I was adamant about staying in his head. Moreover, I was adamant about interrogating him.

He opens the book by telling you he is “inclined to reserve all judgements” and yet, all he does is pass judgement on everyone he meets (in his head, not aloud). He presents himself with such innocent politeness that you can’t help but distrust him if you dig deeper into it.

When he starts courting Jordan, for instance, there’s this moment where he casually mentions (to us) that this whole time he’s been going on dates in New York, he’s still been writing letters to a girl back home “and signing them: ‘Love, Nick.’” He proceeds to tell you that he is “one of the most honest people” he’s ever known. Like—okay? Whatever you say, Nicholas.

Then there’s the scene at the end of chapter two in which Nick drunkenly goes home at night with a man named McKee. Fitzgerald deploys an ellipses (“...”) here, and it makes you go: wait, what the heck happened in those three dots? How did we go from standing in an elevator to “… standing beside his bed”? Is Nick too intoxicated to narrate over this or is he purposefully omitting it?

McKee is a photographer. It can be implied that this “great portfolio in his hands” is a literal photography portfolio but the lack of clarity leaves even that up for interpretation. Especially because, if you read the autograph manuscript of Gatsby (a handwritten earlier draft of the book), you’ll see that originally Fitzgerald didn’t even include that “Beauty and the Beast…” line, which supposedly clarifies the nature of this ‘portfolio.’ You can read the autograph manuscript for yourself here (p. 237 for this scene).

A queer reading of The Great Gatsby is its own conversation, one which started ages ago and there’s nothing new I can add. But it isn’t Nick’s debatable sexuality that intrigued me most about this scene—it’s the constant balance of what he says and what he doesn’t say to his reader, as if even to us (or to himself?) he’s very concerned with his image. In the gaps between his words, I felt there was some honesty begging to be explored.

His narration is also retrospective, speaking from some point in the future. Canonically, two years have passed since the events of the summer—so why is Nick still reminiscing? Why is he drawn to tell the tale of ‘the great Gatsby’ in the first place?

Needless to say, I had a lot of questions for Nick, and so when I started writing LOCAL HEAVENS, I decided my goal was to take this famously passive, fence-sitting character and throw those questions back at him: what would it take to get you off that fence? Whose side would you be on? And most importantly: how do you really feel?

About this crumbling world and what it means to survive it. About Gatsby.

If there’s one thing about me, I love a retrospective narrator. I love frame stories. So I knew I had to do just that for LOCAL HEAVENS—to write a story within a story.

What starts as Gatsby’s tale undoubtedly becomes Nick’s by the end.

It’s taken many drafts to get him where I want him to be, but this unravelling has been very special. Although he was the greatest challenge, he was also the greatest reward, and I’m deeply appreciative for the people who’ve met him so far and loved him.

The feedback I’ve gotten on him helped me push him harder—helped me break expectations for who ‘Nick Carraway’ could be.

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Final thoughts (for now).

I don’t know what the fate of this book will be, but as I wrap up revisions, I’d like to thank everyone who helped make the story more glamourous, brutal and tender than I ever thought possible.

Thank you to Kelley, Lynn, Rachel, and Emily for beta reading. To my agent, Laura, for her passion and guidance. To my brother, for helping me carve out this book’s beating heart.

They say delusion is the only way forward as a writer and maybe that’s true. We build our stories off these delusions, we take our dreams into this unforgiving industry, holding chunks of our souls up to be appraised by strangers and praying that the faces catch the light—that they see something worthy in those glimmers.

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Thanks for reading to the end. If you’ve been following my journey with the book this past year, I appreciate your support. Every encouraging comment and DM has been a gift.

I hope you’ll get to meet Nick someday too—maybe again, maybe for the first time.

-Kris