November 16, 2025 • 57 mins
In this episode, host John welcomes back award-winning author Aaron Ryan, creator of The Dissonance Saga and the upcoming Talisman Series. Together, they explore the dark corners of imagination, morality, and survival — from terrifying alien invasions to the power of hope in a collapsing world.
Aaron shares how The Dissonance Saga began as a trilogy and grew into a six-book epic of human endurance against monstrous Gorgons that paralyze their victims with a glance. He reveals the real-life fears and cinematic influences behind his stories — from Clash of the Titans to Lord of the Rings — and how his new Talisman trilogy continues his exploration of faith, redemption, and cosmic bargains.
They dive deep into:
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👁️ The terrifying origins of the Gorgons and why fear fuels creativity
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🧬 How science fiction can mirror real-world crises like AI and genetic engineering
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💀 Why humanity—not monsters—is often its own worst enemy
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💫 The importance of hope as the central theme in dark fiction
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🎥 The challenges of adapting his novels (Dissonance, Forecast, The End) into award-winning screenplays
Aaron also talks about his creative process, his struggles with writer’s block, and the personal moments that shaped his characters — from flawed heroes to wise mentors like Pastor Rosie, who appears across his connected “Ryanverse.”
👻 Episode Highlights-
“I wanted to reinvent the wheel — something terrifying, but rooted in humanity.”
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“Hope is the only thing stronger than fear. Without it, everything collapses.”
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“AI can’t write emotion. It can’t feel loss or faith — that’s why human stories matter.”
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“The Gorgons came from my childhood fear of Medusa. That’s where the nightmares began.”
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“Fiction lets us explore moral questions safely — what we could do, and what we shouldn’t.”
Aaron Ryan is the author of The Dissonance Saga, The End, The Phoenix Experiment, and the upcoming Talisman Series. His work blends high-concept science fiction with human emotion, tackling moral dilemmas, faith, and the endurance of hope in apocalyptic worlds. His screenplay adaptations have won multiple festival awards and are currently in development.
📚 Find Aaron at: 🌐 AuthorAaronRyan.com 📘 Facebook Group: Author Aaron Ryan Group for giveaways, sneak peeks, and news. 🛒 Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Smashwords & Google Play.
🎧 Listen Now on Dairyland FrightsJoin John as he and Aaron venture beyond the paranormal and into the cosmic unknown — where aliens, ethics, and the human heart collide.
🎙️ “The Dissonance Saga is an alien invasion story — but at its core, it’s about us.”
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker A (00:00):
Foreign.
Welcome to Dairyland Frights, the paranormalpodcast that covers everything creepy, spooky
and mysterious in the Midwest and beyond.
(00:20):
And today I brought back one of my favoritepeople and authors,
Aaron Ryan. Hey, Aaron, how are you?I'm doing well, thanks.
Speaker B (00:31):
How are you? Well, actually, speaking of spooky and because
we're in October, how are you?
Speaker A (00:36):
I love it.
Look at.
This is why I bring him back.
Man.
Speaker B (00:39):
That was for free.
That was just.
That one is for free.
The rest I charge for.
Speaker A (00:42):
Oh, oh, I gotta get that.
The calculator, man.
We're getting up.
No, it's awesome.
I love Aaron.
Go back to our previous episode with Aaronwhere we talked about creatures who, and
correct me if I'm wrong, who have these aliencreatures who come down and basically can like
freeze you in place and kind of just mess withyou while you're frozen in place.
(01:06):
If you could show the book,
please.
There Gorgon.
Speaker B (01:11):
See him? Not to be trusted.
Speaker A (01:12):
Run, Gorgons. Yep. Yes, I was going to.
I was like, yeah, it's Gorgons, right?Yeah, yeah.
And yeah, so he has.
Aaron has a series of books that are not only
award winners, but you know, where you canfind, I imagine on again on Amazon.
Is there any other places other than coming toone of your events when you handle.
(01:35):
Have that.
Is there any other places they could get.
Speaker B (01:37):
Yeah, no, I definitely published wide, so it's Amazon, Barnes and Noble,
Smashwords, Apple Books, Google Play.
Speaker A (01:44):
Yeah.
Speaker B (01:45):
But obviously the best place is direct.
Straight through.
Moi.
Speaker A (01:48):
Yes.
And again,
I, you know, I can't say enough.
Being a creative person,
it is difficult.
Aaron is one of the best.
He has really, really interesting.
No ideas.
I have just started reading your first tome.
(02:09):
Then I got sidetracked on a bunch of stuff.
Stupid life.
So I gotta go back, which is fine.
I live in Wisconsin,
so winter is coming and I hibernate and Ibasically.
So, you know, Aaron, I grab a bunch of booksand I just go,
okay, tonight I'm going to do this instead offreezing my *** off going to whatever.
(02:31):
Yeah, so I'm definitely going to be doing thatand looking through that because I think it's
a great, fascinating story.
And you know, I can't imagine that I will not
have a great time reading it.
And you know, again, I. You will too.
And again, support them on all these sites.
Independent authors, again,
are the lifeblood if we want to continue togrow the industry.
(02:58):
Because I know a lot of people say print isdead, you know, whatever, I don't care.
Nothing beats a good book.
And A favorite beverage and just chill it outon the couch and just reading and getting lost
in that world rather than worrying about, whatare my kids doing?
Speaker B (03:16):
Right.
Speaker A (03:16):
What's my job gonna happen?
So that's what Aaron does, and he should beapplauded for that.
To take your mind off of the crazy stuffthat's going all right in the world.
Although.
Speaker B (03:27):
Did I miss something? Is there something crazy?
I haven't.
I haven't noticed.
Speaker A (03:30):
Although, Aaron, you're not really helping.
Yours isn't about sunshine and unicorns andit's not.
Yeah, it's really not.
It's about gorgons, like, trying to take over
the world and destroying people and doingnasty things to them.
So. Okay, maybe I should.
Speaker B (03:51):
Yeah, no spoilers.
Don't give the whole story.
Sheesh.
Speaker A (03:54):
I'm sorry.
We'll give that away.
But.
So the reason I brought Aaron back on is
because he has a new series working on comingout.
All that good stuff.
So could you update my spooky friends?
Like, what's been happening?
Speaker B (04:08):
Yeah,
nothing.
It's just been very boring.
Crickets here?No,
there's been so much.
So I. I really, really, really, really want to
subtract voiceovers from my daily docket.
I'm a. I'm a daily voiceover artist, pro
voiceover artist.
For example, I'm the voice of UnitedHealthcare
right now.
I record everything back there, and I reallyenjoy it.
There was a time where it really paid thebills, but it's just been doing a little bit
(04:31):
of a nosedive, what with AI low ballers underbidders, the economy, blah, blah, blah.
So I've been trying desperately to.
To continue to just build up the authoring
career, and one of those ways is just simplywrite more books.
The Dissonance Saga.
I can't remember when we last talked how manybooks I had out at that time, but we had.
I wanted to write a trilogy.
(04:52):
Before I knew it, it doubled in size and
became a hexology of six books.
And. And it's the best thing I've everwritten.
I've written.
I'm working on book number 37 as we speak.
But not of Dissonance, by the way.
Dissonance is all done, but my 37th book.
But I love writing books.
I love writing a great story.
I love putting it out there.
It's like a Christmas gift, and then waiting
to see who's gonna snatch it up and open it.
(05:13):
You know, I. I love it.
I just absolutely love it.
So I did pen the Dissonance Saga.
I Penned a few standalones.
I penned a Christian dystopian saga called theEnd.
I penned a few more after that.
And I'm now working on a nonfiction book and a
new trilogy, which is a little like, after afashion, it's a spinoff from the Dissonant
saga.
There are repeat recurring returningcharacters, I should say from Dissonance in
(05:36):
that.
Speaker A (05:36):
Yeah.
Speaker B (05:37):
Called the Talisman series.
Speaker A (05:38):
Ooh, nice.
Very nice.
So could you refresh my spooky friends memory?
I mean, go back and listen to.
About the Dissonance,
you know, series, trilogy and stuff like that.
But could you kind of, you know, just give
them a high overview of what it was aboutagain?
Speaker B (05:55):
Yeah. So Dissonance is basically a story that has roots in 2026.
It starts next year in June of 2026.
These things descend from the sky.
We don'.
Know what they are.
They number about a million.
We fly our drones up to them and we see
they're not crafts, probes, ships or drones.
They are beings.
And they are hovering there in the sky about90 or 50ft above the ground, all over the
(06:18):
Earth.
About a million of them for 90 days.
We think maybe they're angelic messengersbecause they haven't attacked.
Nobody panic.
We'll find out in due time.
90 days goes by.
They all wake up at exactly the same time all
over the planet.
They start jetting out this bluish greenishvapor around themselves.
They look down and they hiss.
Never a good thing to be hissed at.
They attack.
Within 90 more days, 85% of all mankind hasbeen killed off, including all organic life.
(06:42):
We call them Gorgons because, like Medusa, theGorgon.
That's our common frame of reference.
We find you cannot ever lock eyes with them.
If you do that, it's all over.
They have a telepathic paralytic, so they will
immobilize you with their minds.
They will eat you at their leisure.
And you're gonna feel you're conscious andsentient.
You're gonna feel every agonizing bite withoutthe ability to fight back.
(07:07):
So. Awful way to go.
And the story is really a human survival storyset from 2026 all the way up to 2045, grounded
in reality right here on Earth as.
As we survive and try to fight back.
Speaker A (07:19):
Yeah, I love that.
And you know what's interesting to me is, and
this is kind of a question for you too, one ofthe things I was watching this documentary on
writers and stuff and some of the bigger timewriters.
And one of the things, this writer, he.
He came into an office,
and, you know, he gave him the manuscript, andthey're reading through the manuscript, and he
(07:42):
goes, how do you come up with this stuff?
Where do you get this from?
Like, and the guy's like, I'm a writer.
He's like, yeah, so that'd be my question toyou.
Like, how do you come up with this stuff?I mean, what kind of motivates you?
Are you, like, at a. I don't know, a zoo?And you're like,
(08:03):
huh, that'd be really cool if a giraffe could,I don't know, have a spike tongue and.
And, you know, immobilize people or, you know,I don't know, keep going.
Speaker B (08:15):
I just got my next series.
Yeah, it's so funny because, you know, I dovendor markets all the time.
I sell my books at vendor markets.
They're like craft fairs, you know, and book
fairs.
And I'm.
I'm asked frequently, how do you have all thisin your head?
And,
you know, they're asking me this while we'reboth perched over a table loaded with all
these books that I've written and published.
(08:37):
And I. And I get to say, well, I don't.
I mean, they're.
They're all right here now.
You know, they're not in my head anymore.
You just come up with a great idea, and then
you kind of, You.
You nurture it, you play with it, you harness
it, and see what.
Where you can go with it and.
And write.
Now, I will say I am a very organic style ofwriter.
There's two styles of writers.
There's.
There's a pantser.
(08:57):
They fly by the seat of their pants.
It's very organic.
And there's a planner or a plotter,
and those types are much more, you know, indexcards and flow charts and cross your eyes
and.your t's, you know, kinds of writers.
And those guys really have to plot everything
out.
I do have some outline.
Ish natures about me, but ultimately, I really
(09:18):
like to write organically, and I think thathelps me write faster.
Speaker A (09:21):
I don't know.
Yeah, and that's really interesting to me.
Now, let me ask you this.
When you were coming up with the Gorgons and
everything like that,
and you had a. Again, a million differentthings, you could, you know, they could, I
don't know, set people on fire.
They could, you know, just rip people's fleshoff.
They.
(09:41):
You know what I'm saying?
But it's like, okay,
how do I choose the best way?
Because I know there are some writers forexample, get, you know, from the world of
nature how things attack.
Like there's a, like a sea snake supposedly
where,
you know, the, it would lay on the bottom andtake little bites of a little bites of a
(10:03):
little bites.
And I think it's dead.
And then it will just pop up and pop.
And it's.
Poison is so lethal.
You know, whatever attacked it, that was dead,right?
And I'm like,
that's kind of cool.
You know what I mean?
Like, or like with alligators, with deathrolls, a lot of people think chom chomp,
chomp, or gator croc, whatever it is, chomp,chomp, chomp.
(10:25):
They eat you.
No, they drag you down to the bottom, roll you
over, then put you in like maybe a couplerocks or some logs and they just let you
marinate and then they come back.
Snack time.
Speaker B (10:39):
Unless you're a zebra.
If you're a zebra, they're going to eat you
alive right on the surface while you feelevery bite.
So maybe a croc is more like a gorgon in thatregard.
Speaker A (10:47):
Yeah, yeah.
So that's, that's really interesting to me.
And then,
but my, my thing is, how do you then say I getit.
It's, you know, like you, when you watch amovie, like I always joke with Fast and
Furious.
If you've seen any of those movies wherethey're like running cars over weird bridges
and you're like, that can't.
What is going on?
(11:08):
Right.
The physics of it is not.
But that's not the point.
The point is it's fun.
It's a popcorn movie.
Your brain ghost.
I take my brain.
And I said,
right, right.
But in your case with sci fi, you really can'tdo that because someone but as sci fi nerds
who's.
I'm a sci fi nerd is going to be like, really,
(11:29):
Aaron?
Really?
So with the gorgons, when you were thinking ofthat, was there any scientific or technology
technology where you're like,
yeah,
that's interesting.
Speaker B (11:43):
Not based in current zoological, you know, categories.
There's nothing like that that's inspired byanimals as we know them today or the
categories thereof.
I just, I remember when I first started
writing dissonance, they actually were calledDruids and they bore far too uncanny of a
resemblance to a cross between Nazgul andDementor.
(12:04):
And so, you know, Ben done.
Ben done.
I didn't want to, I wanted to reinvent thewheel to a certain extent.
So I, I didn't have the name Gorgon yet, but Idid Want them to be flesh and blood so that
they could actually be destroyed because, youknow, otherwise there's no hope.
And I, I was trying to think back into therecesses of my mind the things that really
scared me, particularly as a kid.
(12:25):
What were the things that just, you know, like
the, the creature under the bed kind of thing.
And I'll never forget being a little guy.
I was only eight, I think.
And the Ray Harryhausen stop motionphotography claymation Clash of the Titans
came out with Harry Hamlin as Perseus andBurgess Mered and all those other stars.
And I,
I will never forget when Medusa, it's myfavorite part of the movie to this day, when
(12:48):
they go into.
I forget what the name of the isle is, but
they pass Cerberus and they go into Medusa'slair.
She zeros one of Pers.
Perseus fellow soldiers.
She comes into frame.
It's dark in there.
She comes into frame.
Her eyes are eerily overlit, almost like these
green luminescent flashlights.
And there's this high dissonant shriek thatplays while she comes right at you.
(13:11):
And it was so terrifying, I had to run out ofthe room because I thought I'm going to get
frozen if I even watch this on tv.
It was so dreadful and realistic.
And I was like, that conjured up so much fear
in me from a young age.
Now there are representations for things likethat with like, I have a nine and six year old
son.
You'd think I'd remember the name the Enderman
(13:32):
in Minecraft.
Right?
You can't look at an Enderman because he putsall these negative thoughts in your mind.
It's similar to that in some respects.
Although these are predators, they're like
space octopus or space lions and that justhappens to be their natural evolutionary gift
that they can use to kill you off.
So perfect match.
And they're frightening as heck.
Speaker A (13:51):
Yeah, yeah.
Now, one of the biggest things about being an
author is everybody, for lack of a betterword, steals from one another.
Whether you, whether you know it or not.
Right?You just.
There's so much stuff you just sometimes don'tknow, like,
oh ****, that was in Independence Day.
Or that was in Mars Attacks.
Or that was in 2001 Space Odyssey.
(14:14):
Like, come on,
it's just gonna happen.
But when you're writing,
how do you avoid those common sci fi tropesand put a new spin on them?
Because that's really hard.
Right?
It's the same trope is the big hero.
Hi, I'm Max Power.
And I'm going to save the world.
(14:36):
He's got muscles and hair and he's good.
And you're like, yeah, I want to write that.
But really,
you know.
Or you don't want to.
So how do you get through those tropes whenyou're writing and going, ah, that's horrible.
Speaker B (14:49):
Yeah, it's a great question.
Ecclesiastes says there's nothing new under
the sun.
Right.
Like, everything's been done before.
I get it.
I am, unfortunately, or fortunately, I'm muchmore cinematically inspired than I am
literarily inspired.
So if you read Dissonance, you're going to seeI wrote it very cinematically.
That's why it was adapted to the screen soeasily in a screenplay format.
(15:11):
But I. I wrote it that way.
And I'm thinking, you know, when the Gorgonsarrive, there could be comparisons made to
Independence day, when the UFOs come andthey're hanging there in the sky and there's a
countdown until they attack.
Very similar strains or threads are found indissonance to that.
But the way I differentiated it is these guysdidn't come down.
Yes, they've got a giant mothership up thereout in space, but they descended bodily
(15:33):
through the clouds, all million of them.
They're not in ships or probes or crafts.
They're not coming down to shoot their green,
you know, lasers at us.
They're just these, you know, partially
humanoid organic life forms that are driftingdown out of the clouds.
And so therein has a little bit ofdifferential right there.
But, you know, an avid reader of Lord of theRings, I'm a massive Lord of the Rings fan,
not that you could tell.
(15:54):
And there's tips of the hat to Tolkien inDissonance, there's tips of the hat to Stephen
King.
There's.
I pay homage to things that I remember frommovies or from other literature as a way of
saying, you inspired me.
I would love to tell JRR Tolkien that to hisface.
I cannot.
So I can only do it literally.
Speaker A (16:13):
A little awkward to dig him up.
Speaker B (16:16):
Very awkward, yeah.
And they can't talk back, so he can't say,
you're welcome, and just be plain weird.
Speaker A (16:21):
Yeah.
So the other question I have for you,
I.
Has become a hot buzz topic.
Right.
More. They're going to be more and moremovies.
There was a movie that just came is coming outwith Chris Pratt that I think is really
original,
where this AI judge,
(16:43):
basically,
it's kind of like Minority Report,
if you know what that is.
I love that movie where you're guilty before
you're proven innocent.
Right.
And you gotta prove you're innocent.
So there's a new movie coming out I just saw
yesterday.
I thought it was really, really interesting.
And this guy through the movie has to prove
(17:04):
he's innocent.
Like the AI's already said, oh, you're guilty.
Or yeah,
but I will give you a chance and I will giveyou time to prove it.
So that kind of reminded me.
It was funny I was thinking about you because
it kind of reminded me of what you were sayingwith the time with the Gorgon coming down.
There's a time on this, you know, I think it'slike an hour and a half.
Yes, of course,
(17:25):
the movie is an hour and a half.
So he's got to figure that out.
And I. But I just thought it's fascinatingbecause he's going through all these things.
Who killed my wife?
Who killed my wife?Oh, wait a minute.
Is it that guy?Is it this guy?
Is it that guy?And then his guiltiness goes up to it, reaches
a certain point.
Oh, he's that.
So I like that.
Yeah. However,
like in your book, I don't know if you dealwith this a lot, but I imagine you will.
(17:47):
Moving forward, how do you deal with theethical implications of certain sci fi themes?
Let's. Let's be honest with God, creation,evolution, on and on and on.
And things such as artificial intelligence orgenetic engineering is becoming a big thing.
Cyborgs are right around the corner, people.
(18:09):
And we have cyborgs right now.
People who lost the leg, unfortunately.
Maybe an accident or over being a soldier.
Over in a war.
Yeah, they're cyborgs.
They're the beginning of cyborgs.
So how do you deal with that without feelinglike you're disparaging something or maybe
(18:30):
kind of being like cuckoo?
Speaker B (18:34):
That's a great question.
I think one of the nice things about sciencefiction is that it is fiction.
It's basically an imaginary view of a relevanttopic.
And so I think one of the best quotes ever inany movie or literature, because obviously
Michael Crichton had it in his book.
I believe.
I don't remember.
It's been a long time since I've read it.
But Dr. Ian Malcolm, Jeff Goldblum says your
(18:56):
scientists were so preoccupied with whether ornot they could, they didn't stop to think if
they should.
Speaker A (19:00):
Correct.
Speaker B (19:00):
And absolutely love that line.
That's a dilemma that a lot of people will
face in technology,
particularly AI.
It's a great relevant question to ask in light
of AI, genetic engineering.
But the nice thing with fiction, and
particularly science fiction, is you can takeit off ramp from the harsh realities of the
current predicament or the current dilemma andimagine what it could be like if you either
(19:22):
solved it or it ran amok.
Right.
And then you just kind of explore that to a
pretend, imaginary sense.
I think it's good fodder for creativity,
number one, but also figuring out, you know,how you navigate it.
With AI My thoughts and my position remainsthe same.
If we talked about it in the last time.
I'm not a fan of AI.
Speaker A (19:42):
Yeah.
Speaker B (19:43):
I posted a video recently where I actually ran an experimental prompt on Grok
for ideas for the Talisman series, and itgenerated five of them.
Gave me, you know, moral ambiguity, strugglesand character breakdowns and blah, blah, blah.
Five of them.
I said, I don't like this.
Okay, try it again.
Give me five more.
I got the other five.
(20:03):
Didn't like them.
Man, these suck.
Tried it one last time.
Five more.
Hated it.
It was stupid.
And then I. I just finally said, you know
what?I'm gonna do this myself.
And I. And I went back.
And I love what I came up with.
Granted, I love it even more because there'scharacters from dissonance that come back in
the.
In the Talisman series.
It's the dissonance verse or the Ryan verse,you know,
(20:24):
or the Aaronverse.
I love that.
But I love what I came up with instead of AI.
Genetic engineering,
I think, is a really polarizing topic as well,and I think it's great fodder for exploitation
in a novel.
I. I actually just wrote book number 35, I
believe was called the Phoenix Experiment.
And it is.
It deals with AI, Sentient AI gone wrong, runamok.
(20:48):
But you also have.
It's kind of like Ash vs Bishop from Alien and
Aliens.
So one is good, one is bad, and they are thepolar opposites.
And it's really interesting to see whathappens when you pit them against each other.
One's going to win, and then the other is.
And then the other is.
And who's going to win out in the end?I loved addressing that.
It wasn't a referendum on AI, but I reallyliked addressing it.
Speaker A (21:10):
Yeah, yeah.
So as an author,
you struggle with some big questions of like,where is this going?
Is this going to be?
You know, there's a bright future and justeverybody stick together,
or is this going to be, yeah, we're going to**** and it's going to get worse.
(21:31):
So what big questions are you exploring withthe distance?
Well, Yuri Distance series and Talismanseries, obviously.
But are you exploring through the nature ofreality and what happens to society facing a
crisis?
Because this is a crisis.
Like, this is like, I equated to.
(21:52):
And not to cut you off, Aaron, but I equatedto.
And unfortunately, remember when 911 happened,every concretely,
everybody, one way or another was involved.
I don't care if you were a farmer in Iowa, you
know, tending your crops, or you were someguy,
you know, I don't know, hanging out at a frathouse, you know,
(22:16):
having a good old time.
That to me is kind of.
I don't want to say that's it, because that's
not it.
But, like, having these Gorgons come down and
seeing your doom happening before you.
That's exactly what happened in there.
You saw the buildings, right?
It wasn't like, oh, they went down.
(22:37):
Bam.
No, it was like, smash.
Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa.
A plane hit it.
Whoa.
What's going on?
Oh, another plane hit.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
You know, and it was happening real time.
And you're watching this going, going, what's
going on?
And then the buildings come down kind of likethe Gorgons.
And like, how do you, you know, this is acrisis.
Like, how do you write that to make the.
(23:00):
Have the audience kind of understand,
like, this is the nature of reality and what'sgoing to happen in this crisis?
Like,
yeah,
well,
one of the questions.
Speaker B (23:11):
For just going back to the Phoenix experiment is can technology and technology
heal grief?Because one of these days someone is going to
come up with some technological invention thateverybody's going to rally behind and say,
hey, now we don't have to be sad anymore.
Grieving doctor Dan Allender says alladdiction is failure to grieve.
We have to grieve, cleanse, and go throughthose four stages of grief.
(23:34):
So important.
So can technology handle grief Isn't so muchthe question or heal grief?
Isn't so much the question.
Should technology heal grief?
Is the question.
Should we or should we just allow ourselves togrieve?
We don't have to anesthetize and take care ofeverything and medicate our pain away.
With 9 11.
I remember it like it was yesterday.
I wrote forecast.
(23:55):
It's a 911 historical fiction thriller that
sees 911 entirely prevented.
It never happens, and all those lives are
saved.
I wrote it very cathartically.
It was a very therapeutic piece of work for meto write because I would love to a world where
that doesn't happen.
It's not possible anymore.
It is Part of history.
It's.
(24:16):
It's inexorable from our history, but it gives
you a little bit of a way to remember, toreflect.
I think what's sad about today in our currentcancel culture is things get.
Not just put in a closet, but they get erasedand removed because somebody's gonna get
triggered somewhere.
It's like, with all due respect to people who
have maybe lost somebody, you wanna besensitive to that.
(24:39):
Yes. But we don't have to completely whitewashus so that nobody gets hurt.
What doesn't kill us makes us stronger.
Martin Luther King said that.
And so, you know, I think that we need to dealwith some of the emotions around 9 11.
Some of the emotions around AI not just go,oh, it'll be okay, and, you know, push it
aside.
There's all kinds of moral quandaries we're
(25:00):
always going to have to deal with.
I love how fiction gives us.
Gives us a way to.
To encounter those and handle them.
Speaker A (25:07):
Absolutely.
And so when you're also doing this, do you
ever take PA to see, like, is any of thisplausible or do you just like, keep kind of
going and being like, it's side.
No, I mean, come on.
Speaker B (25:22):
Yeah. I wrote the Slide.
The Slide.
Boy,
you talk about being cinematically inspired.
The Slide came to me in a fusion of, I don't
know if you remember Multiplicity.
That movie with Michael Keaton.
Speaker A (25:33):
Yes. Yeah.
Speaker B (25:35):
So that one and.
And the Fly.
The Fly with Jeff Goldblum.
So, you know, you put them together and you
get, you know, teleportation, and things couldgo wrong.
It was just going to be a novel about whatcould go wrong.
It was almost going to be a referendum on thedangers of teleportation technology.
I think there are inherent dangers there, but,you know, we're not there yet.
That's what the novel was going to focus on.
(25:56):
But I thought, you know,
it's a little too far off into the future.
I don't know that people will be able torelate to this, but they can relate to
impending doom.
So here you have a protagonist who has
developed much like Jeff Goldblum in hisapartment, teleportation technology and
chambers that are like Jeff Goldblum's pods.
And the teleportation is a success.
(26:17):
He goes through tests.
He tests his dog, he tests birds.
He tests, finally himself.
Musters up the courage to test himself.
Very reminiscent of the fly.
There's no creature that gets in there and
gets accidentally spliced together.
But then you start to see the whole picture of
is this Relevant.
It is relevant.
If a supermassive black hole is on its way to
the Milky Way galaxy and is going to destroyeverything,
(26:39):
could we teleport somewhere else, away fromEarth, away from the Milky Way galaxy?
And so that set a very cool precedent in mymind for.
For imagining the scope of what teleportationtechnology could do.
Speaker A (26:52):
Yeah. Yeah. So speaking on that technology and maybe some themes and some
social commentary in your.
In your books,
like, what, I guess, do you have?I don't want to say an agenda.
That's a wrong word.
But, like, what does your story say about the
(27:13):
current world and the future of humanity?
Like, is that something you go in being like,yep, this is where I'm going, or does this
kind of just flows and just comes out, youknow?
You know?
Speaker B (27:29):
Yeah, I think.
I think it's a mixture of both.
I mean, I don't intend any of my books to be areferendum on anything.
Speaker A (27:35):
Okay.
Speaker B (27:35):
But, yeah, there's.
There are definitely social issues that we all
face.
And I think, you know, right now, almost every
single one of my novels has a kernel ofthematic depth in it that I think you could
apply to whatever we're going through rightnow.
And that kernel is hope.
You. You subtract hope from any situation, and
people are bereft of willingness to survive,to push through, to win.
(27:59):
I love what President Snow says in the HungerGames.
He says.
He's talking to Seneca Crane, the original
game maker, and he says, hope.
It is the only thing stronger than fear.
Fear keeps us in our place.
Fear turns to anger.
Anger turns to hate.
Hate turns to suffering.
The prophet Yoda said that fear keeps usimmobilized.
(28:20):
Hope gets us out of that rigor mortis andencourages us to take risks and get out there
and try to last and survive and thrive.
So, yes, there's a kernel of truth in all ofmy novels that's.
That really centers around hope.
Without hope, everything sucks, and it will
suck forever.
With hope, you can take action.
You can do monumental things.
(28:41):
There is a way out of this current conundrum.
I really value hope being a central coremessage of any of my novels.
Speaker A (28:49):
Yeah, but then how do you.
Because conflict, intention,
that's part of being an author.
You can't just have everybody, like I said,
skipping along, and unicorns and lollipops,everybody's sharing picnics.
What do you do?Because this is very true in today's world.
There's the right and the left.
Right and, well, the middle.
(29:10):
Conservative, whatever you want to say it.
And this is in a Political podcast, obviously.
And there's always someone who says, like you
said, hey, there's hope.
God, we can get through it.
And everybody, there's another person saying,
nope, we're never going to get through this.
And then there's a third person saying, only
if it's done my way.
Right, Right.
There's hope.
(29:31):
Way.
So if you do it my way.
And I, I take this a lot from I stopped
watching it, but like Walking Dead and stuff,Walking Dead was about, okay, there's a common
goal.
There's zombies, they're getting worse, wegotta kill the zombies.
However, in there, there's different powerplays.
There's different kingdoms who are trying toestablish themselves.
(29:52):
Right.
Because they feel what they need to do is thebest solution.
Right.
So how do you balance that in your books when
you're writing about, okay, the Gorgon'scoming down, maybe somebody.
And maybe you already have that because Iapologize, I haven't read all the book yet.
But is there people in there who like, ah,maybe they're not so bad.
Maybe we can use them or something.
(30:13):
Maybe we can manipulate that.
Speaker B (30:15):
Yeah, well, one of the central messages of the dissonant saga really is that
mankind is always the worst enemy of mankind.
Yes.
It's an alien invasion saga.
I mean, that's inexorable.
It is an alien invasion saga.
And so you have to deal with these accursed
nuisances of beings that are here and they ownthe planet now.
You have to deal with that.
And that's unpleasant as it is.
(30:35):
But what's even more unpleasant is that we've
got this humanity on the brink of extinctionafter 16 years of alien occupation.
You would think by that time we would all beworking together.
We would all be, you know, getting along andworking so hard to kick these things to the
curb.
But it just doesn't happen that way.
There are people always, always, always selfabsorbed, putting themselves forward, you
(30:58):
know, throwing monkey, monkey wrenches intothe works.
Speaker A (31:00):
Yes.
Speaker B (31:01):
And we have to deal with them.
And so it's kind of like the Rodney King cry.
Can we all get along?
You know,
and it's just hard when we, when we don't,that becomes the worst problem.
Speaker A (31:11):
So, yeah.
And I think that's something that again, it's
kind of a trope per se.
There's always a guy like,
you know, since we're both movie people, I'lluse Die Hard.
One of my favorite scenes in Die Hard.
I know it's not sci fi, but the sales guy goes
in there and tries to Convince Hans Gruberthat he's.
Oh, he's his friend, and he's gonna helpeverything and he'll smooth this out and
(31:34):
they'll get their money.
And Don McLean's like, no, you idiot, he's
going to kill you.
Speaker B (31:40):
Yeah. What are you doing?
Speaker A (31:41):
He thinks you.
You know, whatever, you know, it's too much or
you're going to get us both killed.
And there's always people like that, right?
The person just,
why are you attacking this, whether it be aGorgon or sage or whatever, when you know it's
not going to work yet in your mind, you thinkit works because whatever your delusion or
(32:02):
anything, and I think that's an interestingthing, you know, as an author, like, do you
put that in the book?
Do you make it a main thing?Do you just say, like,
okay, you know, how am I going.
How am I going to fit that in?
Because that's important.
Right?
Just people like that, we.
We meet them every day.
Yep.
Speaker B (32:19):
Yeah. There are team players, and there's just lone rangers, and you just have
to kind of decide and hope for the best thatwe're all going to work together.
I think one of the greatest things is there isa character in the dissonance saga in
particular, that basically turns sides.
He doesn't know that he's necessarily on the
wrong side, but he comes back.
And so there's that arc that's always sorewarding in the end, where you think you've
(32:41):
lost this accomplice, this ally,
this person who was faithful to you andeverybody else for so long.
And then that arc brings them back, and it's.
It's restorative.
It's very, very redemptive to see them comeback.
It's not always going to be that way.
There are going to be people who are.
They're won over to the dark side, you know,and they just don't get it.
(33:02):
And you are so mad and perplexed why theydon't get it.
You know?Yeah, everybody else knows that this person is
evil.
Why are you supporting them?
And.
And they don't understand that.
No, they're good and you're evil.
Speaker A (33:14):
Yeah. Right.
And, you know, the.
The most common with that is Darth Vader and
Luke Skywalker.
Right.
Is there's still good in him.
And everybody's like, he just wiped out a
planet of innocent people.
No, no, no. There's still some good in him.
No.
Yeah, I know that.
Speaker B (33:30):
Even before that.
Remember Anakin's dilemma?
Speaker A (33:34):
Yeah.
Speaker B (33:34):
He's talking with.
With Padme and she says the situation.
Oh, no, no. He's talking with Obi Wan inRevenge of the Sith, and he says, obi Wan
says, you know, the Sith are evil, orChancellor Palpatine is evil.
And Anakin goes, in my opinion, the Jedi areevil.
You know,
Adolf Hitler thought he was right.
He thought he was the good guy.
(33:56):
So, yeah, there's people that are justdeluded.
Speaker A (33:58):
Yeah, there's just people who think they're right and, you know, all these severe
tragedies in the world, everyone.
I was right.
You know, you can go down the line.
No, I'm right.
So we're nerding out here.
I love it.
Of a nerd podcast.
So can you tell me,
Aaron, about or share a moment with me fromyour personal life that inspired a scene or
(34:22):
character in your book?
Speaker B (34:23):
Well, I. I mean, the first thing that I jump to is the proposal between Allie
and Jet.
It's a spoiler.
But, you know, this was released in May of2024.
So by now, it's whatever.
It's. It's not perfect.
It's full of,
you know, silliness, and it's clumsy.
And so I look at my own proposal a little bitthat way with my wife.
(34:44):
So I like the fact that things aren't squeakyclean.
And that's the way that dissonance is.
It's. It's more Star wars with oil drippingout of the panelization of the Millennium
Falcon,
as opposed to squeaky clean, white, antisepticwalls of the starship Enterprise.
And there's not a trace of dust anywhere.
I like dirt under the nails.
And I like the colonial Marines from Aliens.
(35:06):
Grimy.
So that would be one.
I'm a natural cynic.
Some people are a natural blonde.
I'm a natural cynic.
And that's really mirrored in Jet Cameron JettShipley in Dissonance, Volume one reality.
And he has to make that move to trust.
As the series goes on.
There's too many to list because I constantlyreference in.
In the saga how he's a cynic, and that's verymuch a reflection of me as well.
Speaker A (35:29):
Yeah,
and I hear you.
I'm a realistic, positive person.
You know, like, something's probably gonna gowrong, but let's.
Let's work it out.
One of the biggest things for writers is youwrite a scene.
Oh, man, this is the greatest thing I've everwritten.
I'm gonna have a beer or champagne orwhatever, and then you come back the next
(35:52):
morning and go, what the hell did I just do?
How do you.
How do you cut that out?How do you take that?
You know, just.
Oh, my God, that just hurtful,
painful thing to be like, I gotta cut thisseed.
How do you come across that?
Speaker B (36:08):
I'm just gonna say, you know, there are some people that struggle with writer's
block, and there are other people that arenaysayers and say it doesn't exist.
And I can't stand it when people say that,because of course it exists.
It's a phenomenon.
You can't write.
You can't.
I struggled with writer's block for the
beginning of the Talisman series.
I wasn't sure which direction I wanted it to
go, but to.
The only time that.
I mean, the time that sticks out in my head
(36:30):
the most is when I wrote Forkast.
And the protagonist, Roland Bishop,
is struck by lightning.
And I had him go in a direction where he.
He prevents a crime, but he does so in a verysuperheroistic fashion.
And he's got lightning in his body, so nowhe's able to electrocute someone.
He's able.
He's welling up with blue fire inside him, and
(36:53):
it's.
He's combusting.
And I thought,
do I want to go?I mean, with all the superhero fatigue that
we're experiencing,
Marvel and all that stuff and DC andeverything, do I really want to go down this
path?But I just followed it.
I followed it, and it was exactly the rightdirection to go.
But as I'm writing and I'm going, I don'tknow, dude.
(37:13):
Is this really, like, wait a minute.
But by the time you get to the end of thebook, you go, that Aaron Ryan guy is
brilliant.
You know, because this needed to happen where
I was struggling with this writing part inorder for this massive, awesome conclusion to
happen.
And Roland Bishop, in and of himself as asingle, solitary human,
would not have been able feasibly to.
(37:35):
To thwart the plans of 19 hijackers acrossfour different planes.
He wouldn't have been able to.
But Roland Bishop, imbued with incredible
powers.
Yes.
So he did need to have some powers.
Speaker A (37:47):
Yeah. And. And that's.
That's interesting to me because,
again,
having certain powers can be.
In a book, you have fun, but you look throughthe care as a writer, you gotta.
You can't think about, well, I'm gonna givehim powers.
You got to think about what those powers mean.
Speaker B (38:05):
Right, Exactly.
What are they for?
Speaker A (38:06):
What is he going to do? So, like, like,
obviously,
a lot of superheroes, they have so much.
I mean, being a Jedi Knight.
Well, I'M gonna go back to this.
I always say this.
I'm sorry to go off on a little tangent here,but I would hate to be Batman.
I would absolutely hate it.
(38:26):
Because there's no way you get out of that.
You're trapped forever because you're like,oh, I'm gonna take a vacation,
Joker.
Starting something new again back.
And then, you know, that's why I always likewhere a lot of graphic novels go with the
character and maybe you will do this.
(38:47):
I don't know if you do this with character
right now, where you just finally,
like, there's the Dark Knight series, DarkKnight Returns, where Batman's this older
gentleman and he's insane and he's literallyjust killing people left and right, basically.
Or hurting them.
You know, I should say.
I don't think he's killing people.
I have to go back.
(39:07):
But he's hurting people like, yeah, badly.
And, you know, because he's just gone.
His mind is just frazzled because he's just.
You know what I mean?I think that's really interesting in the
character, right, that gets to that point,like, where do they.
Where do they stop?Where?
It's just like, how many people.
(39:27):
Can I say?
Speaker B (39:28):
Yeah, the humanity of them.
I think you have to visit that humanity
because you need to keep the charactergrounded and attainable to your human readers.
One of the things, though, that I can't stand,and I think movies sometimes go far, too far
with this is,
you know, you can't see behind my door there,but I have Gandalf the Grays, big brown staff.
(39:49):
It's life size.
It's incredible.
It's thick, it's heavy.
Speaker A (39:51):
Nice.
Speaker B (39:52):
Gandalf was very humanized.
Ian McKellen's portrayal of him was spot on.
But, you know, he's bound to a script that he
has to.
He has to comply with.
And he was just.
He was very humanized.
They took some of his best lines andattributed them to Aragorn or whoever else.
They subtracted him of some of his power andmade him more of a.
(40:12):
Of a consultant, you know, in some respects.
And no, this guy was.
This guy was one of the maiar.
He was 3000 years old and he was incredibly
powerful.
So he was a spirit, you know, trapped inside a
body.
Especially when he came back as Gandalf theWhite,
you know, he was even more powerful.
And so oftentimes people can err, the creators
(40:33):
can err in making them too human.
And then you lose the majesty or the abilityor the.
The magnanimity of that that character,because you've brought them so down to earth.
It's necessary because then it keeps merelating to that character.
This is why in my sci fi, I. I'm a sci fienthusiast at heart.
(40:53):
That's my branding and I incorporate a lot ofheart because I want the human struggle at the
center, whoever it is.
I want you to relate.
Go. I get that.
And that keeps the reader engaged.
Speaker A (41:05):
Yeah, absolutely.
So I always love asking authors this, whatcharacter have you written that you just never
put him in a series like I want to put him in,but he's just not developed or whatever it
might be.
Is there any character where you're like, oh,
maybe.
I don't know.
Speaker B (41:24):
Yeah, I'd have to do a deep dive on.
On all of them.
I don't know.
I love all of my characters, but especiallythe ones in Dissonance and the end.
I love the androids in.
In the Phoenix Experiment because they are, ofcourse, synthetic people.
You know, they're not.
That's the wrong word.
They're synthetic life forms.
And that itself is the wrong word as well,
because they're not life forms.
They're synthetic machines.
(41:44):
I think they're so incredibly alluring and
mysterious and interesting,
but I don't.
I certainly couldn't do a stand standalone
novel on Stygius Cryptus, the.
The anthro meta model from.
From the Phoenix Experiment, or BaryonisTalicus, the opposing anthro meta model in the
Phoenix Experiment.
They just don't have that depth of life orbackstory or character to exploit.
Speaker A (42:07):
Yeah, yeah.
The other question, and this is my favorite
question to ask author,
is there anything that you wish you wouldhave?
Rich?Is there anything out there you went, man?
Speaker B (42:19):
Yeah. Yeah, definitely the Lord of the Rings and definitely the Hunger Games.
I love both.
Speaker A (42:24):
Why?
Speaker B (42:25):
Well, the Lord of the Rings is the first thing that I remember reading as a. As a
young teenager, in fact, probably even earlierthan that.
I just remember being so blown away.
Every page was like, what?It was so grand and deep and wide and high and
long.
All the characters, you loved them.
All the lands you love them, all the
languages, you loved them.
Everything was perfect about Lord of the
(42:46):
Rings, the Hunger Games.
I just love that struggle unto.
Almost unto despair.
This is where hope meets its match in despair.
Because President Snow's got all the power.
And this is a sick, twisted thing that they dothat they've put under the guise of nobility,
they process these poor chosen, conscriptedwarriors that aren't warriors to kill each
(43:09):
other.
You know, fight to the death.
And there's no way out for them, so they just
have to be.
They have to dump in.
They have to jump into that.
That water and be carried down the tide and
just do what they must.
It's such a compelling story, though.
And you just love the victory in the end.
Speaker A (43:23):
Yeah, right.
And I think that that's truly amazing withstories like that, where they bring you.
I was just rewatching the extended version ofLord of the Rings, Fellowship of the Rings.
Speaker B (43:40):
Is there any other version? I don't think so.
Speaker A (43:41):
Yeah, there are some things in there where I'm like, okay, really?
It's kind of like they're having a hamsandwich together.
Not that they are, but you know what I mean?
It's like a scene where.
Hi, how are you?
I'm doing well.
Do you know that Lord of Oregon, Blah, blah,
blah.
Okay,
good.
He likes blue.
You know what I mean?I'm not saying it's that simple, but you know
(44:03):
what I mean?It's like, did that really need to be in
there?That I know that some guy, like, stepped on a
frog one day and, like, you know, like, okay,that's.
Speaker B (44:13):
J.R.R. tolkien would take, like, three paragraphs to describe a rock, you know?
Speaker A (44:17):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker B (44:18):
But he.
He believed in his world so much.
That's why.
Speaker A (44:20):
Exactly.
I always say one of the biggest things is I'm
a big Philip K. **** fan and a Rod Serlingfan.
I would do anything just to be a fly on thewall.
Like, Twilight Zone to me is still, to thisday amazing.
The.
The epitome, the gold standard.
(44:40):
Because it's, you know, he.
Back in the day, you don't have a lot offacts.
You don't have.
Whatever.
And you got to think of, like, what if I havea camera that turns people and, you know,
shows them, like, what's going to happen inthe future?
You know what I mean?Like, oh, you take a picture and then the
lady's flying out the window or whatever, andyou're like.
And then it happens,
(45:01):
you know?And one of, like, one of my favorite scenes,
and this is just genius,
where there is this criminal and he's in.
And.
Sorry, going off a tangent really good reallyquickly, but there's this criminal, and he's
in this place which he.
Which he thinks is heaven because he's winning
at gambling, he's got all the dames, and he'sgot money and liquor.
(45:23):
He's robbing places and getting all thismoney.
And then at the end,
he goes, hey,
I don't think I'm supposed to be here.
This is.
This is heaven.
I'm not supposed to be here.
I'm a scumbag and everything.
And the guy goes, why do you think this washeaven?
And then you realize he's in hell.
You know?
Speaker B (45:43):
Yeah.
Speaker A (45:44):
You know what I mean? Because that's.
And I love that, you know, that line of, like,what do you.
Why do you think you're in heaven?You know, what makes you think you're in
heaven?
And, you know, and if you think about it,that's very true to life.
If just everything goes right for you.
A lot of people, oh, that'd be nice.
But after a while, you'd be like, oh, my God,you know, enough's enough,
(46:07):
right?
It just.
Because there's no challenge.
There's no nothing going on.
And I think that's really interesting to like
your books.
You know, there's a challenge of these Gorgons
coming down.
Like,
if they just said, hey, how you doing?We're gonna.
We're gonna fix everything.
We're gonna fix your medical,
your,
you know, your infrastructure.
(46:27):
You'd be, oh, this is great,
by the way.
We make great pizzas.
So here you go, too.
You need to be like,
okay.
Speaker B (46:35):
Yeah.
Speaker A (46:36):
It'd be funny, though, but not necessarily what people want to read.
So let's talk about your new series, andwhat's that all about?
Speaker B (46:45):
So the Talisman series.
So this is something where I know that I
totally differ from a lot of authors outthere.
I like to design the COVID first.
So if I get an idea for a new series, it's
usually the title and the COVID and I willenvision the COVID and I'll design it and
basically,
like, reverse engineer it.
That gives me something.
It gives me forward momentum.
It gives me a trajectory and a goal to work
(47:06):
forward to and basically, you know, advancetowards.
As a dissonance aficionado, I mean, I wrote myown series, and I love it.
This, I always think, is over, and then itcomes calling again.
But the protagonists that are in dissonance onhere, all these guys, some of them are going
to make their way into the Talisman seriesbecause it's set in the same earth,
(47:29):
it's set in the same time frame, it's theirbeloved characters by many.
And so it's really hard to get away and kindof exercise yourself from a story that you
love.
I had a hard time envisioning what it wasgoing to be until I realized there's a great
character in this saga whose backstory I havenot mined Enough or properly.
And so he can be the new protagonist of theTalisman series.
(47:52):
So the Talisman series is one of thoseprotagonists.
He makes a cosmic deal with some.
Some strange forces.
You'll find out who they are by book 3.
He has lost his wife.
He's a former war hero.
He's lost his wife.
And these cosmic forces have offered him abargain.
Save 1000 lives and we will return your wifeto you.
We will resurrect her from the dead.
(48:12):
And so he is an indentured servant in this
role of the Talisman.
He's imbued with these powers.
He's got a suit.
He leaves these trinkets behind,
you know, everywhere he goes, when he rescuessomeone, they are the Talisman, you know,
figures.
But unbeknownst to him, there is.
And then he finds out eventually there is acounter force that used to be a talisman but
(48:34):
renounced his charge.
And so his love stayed dead.
And he is bitter, he's angry, and he wants
revenge on not just the Talisman, but the.
They're called the Aetarium Axis, who, you
know, bestowed these powers upon these poor,witless humans.
He wants revenge against him and them.
And so he's going to kill them.
Kill him, gain his powers, kill them.
(48:55):
And so he's being stalked by a reporter.
He's being stalked by this evil force.
And it ends with a very cliffhangery, like,
**** moment at the end of book one.
So sets the stage for the rest of them.
Speaker A (49:08):
I love it.
I love it.
That sounds.
Looking forward to that.
It sounds so interesting.
Again,
it's just something I compliment you on.
You come up with these great ideas to keep sci
fi out there too, because that's a big thingtoo, you know, Sci fi has to stay out there
for you to survive.
And I know people argue Marvel Sci Fi.
(49:30):
Yeah, okay, I see what you're saying.
But before we wrap up here, what's onecharacter you would love to have a beer with?
These are in your books, by the way.
Or maybe go to dinner with?
Just pick their brain.
Speaker B (49:44):
Yeah, I love Pastor Rosie.
Pastor Rosie is my.
I believe it is John Grisham who has thecharacter named Denton Voyles.
And Denton Voyles travels between all of hisbooks.
First he's the D.A. then he's the AttorneyGeneral, then he's the head of the FBI.
And it's this name that.
That John Grisham likes to carry over into hisother novels.
(50:05):
For me, that's Pastor Rosie.
So Pastor Rosie Campion is a spiritual advisor
to virtually everybody in the saga inDissonance.
And she has appeared in Forecast.
She is a key player in the Phoenix experiment.
She is in the slide.
She is of sorts in the end.
And she will be in Talisman.
So really exciting to see all of that cometogether.
(50:26):
But man, I'd love.
She's very wise and very maternal and elderly.
And you just.
You love talking to a person like that.
That is so crowned with wisdom.
Where you're like, how do you see with such
clear eyes?You know?
And help everyone see who's.
Whose vision is murky.
I love people like that.
I'm impressed by them.
Speaker A (50:45):
Yeah. And then question to go along with that.
How about just from literary history.
What one character you love too?
Speaker B (50:53):
Gandalf. Absolutely. Gandalf.
I just want to touch his cloak.
I want to touch his cloak.
I want to touch his hair.
I want to hug him.
Speaker A (50:59):
Creepy.
Speaker B (51:01):
It's fine.
I would hold on to that cloak and I'd never
let go, baby.
I was like, can I please wear it?
Speaker A (51:06):
Can you let me have it?
Gandalf is always interesting to me justbecause maybe I remember the books and
everything like that.
But it always made me the only scene in that
whole trilogy where you kind.
Not to say that you didn't see other times,but where you saw his full power when he was
on taking out the bell rock.
(51:27):
It was a bell Rog, the demon.
I always threw that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And he's saying you.
You show not past and stuff.
And then you're like, ****, this.
This guy's for real.
You know.
And he did some with the Nausicule, you know,where he's shining that light and stuff like
that.
But I thought.
And some of the scenes where he's likefighting and everything.
(51:48):
I'm like, couldn't he just been like, zap,zap, zibbity zoo and be like destroyed?
I don't know.
You tell me.
Speaker B (51:54):
That's what I said.
That's what I was saying earlier is they just.
They humanized him too much.
I love in.
In the Lord of the Rings, Gandalf.
And they.
And the.
And the Fellowship are in the chamber ofMazarbul.
And they found balance or balance to Balin.
I can't believe I said it like that.
They found Balin's tomb.
That's shades of the 1978 Ralph Bakshi Lord of
(52:15):
the Rings creeping through.
They found Balin's tomb.
And now you know, here come.
Here comes a Balrog.
Here comes cave trolls and orcs and all that
stuff.
Gandalf goes and he puts the door, he closes
the door.
He says, run.
You know, everybody run.
Closes the door, he seals it with a spell.
And then he's holding the door and someone,
something grabs the handle of the door on theother side.
And he says, it perceived me in my spell.
(52:37):
I had to speak a word of command with a
capital C. I had to speak a word of command.
It nearly broke me,
but it was like I could read that sentenceover and over and over again.
That's Gandalf's power at work.
And they deprived him of that to some level in
the movies, which was kind of a bummer.
Speaker A (52:55):
Yeah, yeah.
And that's really.
That's really.
Yeah, that's really interesting to me.
And then I have one other question for you.
I'm guessing you're going to say this.
If you could live in any sci fi world,
any sci fi, where would it be?I'm guessing, what's it going to be?
But go ahead.
I thought you were gonna say Hobbit Shyer.
(53:16):
You know, it's like, come on.
Speaker B (53:18):
No, this is the world of 2026 to 2045.
Granted, three of them are set in 2042.
I just.
I would want to be in that world and I wouldwant to meet my characters.
I took a trip to Clarksville, Tennessee,
and Blue and Nashville and Blue Spring,Kentucky in Labor Day last year.
And I had not been there prior to writingDissonance, which is set there among other
(53:41):
locations.
I sculpted the story using, you know, Google
street view and aerial view and learning whereeverything goes.
But to be there, absolutely surreal.
Now, my characters, they do exist, okay.
And they're in my mind and they're in myheart.
So to be there and to know that this is whereI put them was absolutely like just.
It was such a. Straddling the line betweenreality and fantasy.
(54:04):
But it was so cool.
This is where it happened.
Oh, I loved it.
Speaker A (54:08):
Yeah. So people who are looking to get your books and everything before we.
You tell them where they can.
Speaker B (54:13):
It's a. It is an alien invasion saga.
Yes.
But it is a human survival story even more.
And the characters are full and the story isfull of thematic depth.
The aliens, the Gorgons, are fantasticallyterrifying.
They are deadly evil.
But is mankind even worse?
And you're going to love the characters.
You actually get to grow up with the
(54:36):
characters from, you know, as young as, youknow, two years old, all the way up to.
You've got 70 year olds.
But the young ones, you grow up with them in
the saga and you live with them and love withthem and learn with them.
Speaker A (54:48):
Just wrapping up here.
I've taken so much of your time.
I wish I could take more, but I understandwhat's coming up.
Where can they find you?
You know,
give them the spiel.
Speaker B (55:00):
Well, still working very hard at pitching the screenplay for Dissonance Volume
one Reality to major studios.
Yeah,
I've got the end adapted for.
For the screen as well.
And that's one entrance into several filmfestivals and won some awards.
Put me on IMDb.
Nice forecast.
The 911 novel has been adapted for the screen.
That's been entered into some film festivalsas well.
(55:22):
So that's awesome.
And still waiting to hear on all those.
Talisman is underway.
I'm about.
I'm a few days probably away from publishing abook called you're going straight to Helen in
a Handbasket.
And then.
And then the Talisman, you know, is, is what
I'll be working on after that, the other twoinstallments.
But they can always go to authoraronryan.comand subscribe to the blog or they can go to
author AaronRyan Group,
(55:44):
which takes them to my exclusive Facebookgroup where they'll find discount codes,
giveaways, news on the screenplays, news onappearances, blah, blah, blah.
And I'm always so grateful for the readershipand the support.
Speaker A (55:56):
Yes, absolutely.
And like I said before, I'll say it again,
please support Aaron and other independentauthors out there.
Do your best to, you know, go out there and,you know, get the books or just talk or just,
you know, just have interactions just like hispages and stuff, because that will move him up
(56:16):
into the algorithms and whatever the heckthey're doing to us nowadays to get him more
notoriety and give him more the prestige thatI think he needs and definitely deserve.
So thank you, Aaron.
Speaker B (56:29):
Thank you.
Speaker A (56:30):
Always amazing time.
Like I said, I wish I could have you on more
and I'll have you on again because I'm sureyou come up with another other book series
that will blow my mind and, and make me go,
yeah, this guy's pretty good.
Speaker B (56:42):
Thank you for having me back.
It's always a pleasure and I really appreciate
it, John.
Speaker A (56:46):
You betcha.
And again, you know, stay spooky, people.
We have Halloween coming up, so I know thisisn't Halloween, but still go back in, you
know, good sci fi book sometimes change thepace up, you know.
Speaker B (56:58):
Yeah. Hey, the Talisman, the first installment in Talisman, called Subterfuge, is
publishing on Halloween.
So there you go.
Speaker A (57:04):
All right.
All right.
Well,
I'LL make sure I have all the links in therewhen this episode comes out.
So you can go out there and visit his pageand, you know, ask him questions and just find
out, you know, what's coming up next.
So hopefully you can learn a little bit moreabout Aaron.
All right.
Thanks, Aaron.
It was great.
You have a good one, buddy.
Speaker B (57:25):
You, too.
Speaker A (57:26):
Bye.
Speaker B (57:26):
Bye.
Speaker A (57:33):
Sam.
Foreign.
Welcome to Dairyland Frights, the paranormalpodcast that covers everything creepy, spooky
and mysterious in the Midwest and beyond.
(00:20):
And today I brought back one of my favoritepeople and authors,
Aaron Ryan. Hey, Aaron, how are you?I'm doing well, thanks.
Speaker B (00:31):
How are you? Well, actually, speaking of spooky and because
we're in October, how are you?
Speaker A (00:36):
I love it.
Look at.
This is why I bring him back.
Man.
Speaker B (00:39):
That was for free.
That was just.
That one is for free.
The rest I charge for.
Speaker A (00:42):
Oh, oh, I gotta get that.
The calculator, man.
We're getting up.
No, it's awesome.
I love Aaron.
Go back to our previous episode with Aaronwhere we talked about creatures who, and
correct me if I'm wrong, who have these aliencreatures who come down and basically can like
freeze you in place and kind of just mess withyou while you're frozen in place.
(01:06):
If you could show the book,
please.
There Gorgon.
Speaker B (01:11):
See him? Not to be trusted.
Speaker A (01:12):
Run, Gorgons. Yep. Yes, I was going to.
I was like, yeah, it's Gorgons, right?Yeah, yeah.
And yeah, so he has.
Aaron has a series of books that are not only
award winners, but you know, where you canfind, I imagine on again on Amazon.
Is there any other places other than coming toone of your events when you handle.
(01:35):
Have that.
Is there any other places they could get.
Speaker B (01:37):
Yeah, no, I definitely published wide, so it's Amazon, Barnes and Noble,
Smashwords, Apple Books, Google Play.
Speaker A (01:44):
Yeah.
Speaker B (01:45):
But obviously the best place is direct.
Straight through.
Moi.
Speaker A (01:48):
Yes.
And again,
I, you know, I can't say enough.
Being a creative person,
it is difficult.
Aaron is one of the best.
He has really, really interesting.
No ideas.
I have just started reading your first tome.
(02:09):
Then I got sidetracked on a bunch of stuff.
Stupid life.
So I gotta go back, which is fine.
I live in Wisconsin,
so winter is coming and I hibernate and Ibasically.
So, you know, Aaron, I grab a bunch of booksand I just go,
okay, tonight I'm going to do this instead offreezing my *** off going to whatever.
(02:31):
Yeah, so I'm definitely going to be doing thatand looking through that because I think it's
a great, fascinating story.
And you know, I can't imagine that I will not
have a great time reading it.
And you know, again, I. You will too.
And again, support them on all these sites.
Independent authors, again,
are the lifeblood if we want to continue togrow the industry.
(02:58):
Because I know a lot of people say print isdead, you know, whatever, I don't care.
Nothing beats a good book.
And A favorite beverage and just chill it outon the couch and just reading and getting lost
in that world rather than worrying about, whatare my kids doing?
Speaker B (03:16):
Right.
Speaker A (03:16):
What's my job gonna happen?
So that's what Aaron does, and he should beapplauded for that.
To take your mind off of the crazy stuffthat's going all right in the world.
Although.
Speaker B (03:27):
Did I miss something? Is there something crazy?
I haven't.
I haven't noticed.
Speaker A (03:30):
Although, Aaron, you're not really helping.
Yours isn't about sunshine and unicorns andit's not.
Yeah, it's really not.
It's about gorgons, like, trying to take over
the world and destroying people and doingnasty things to them.
So. Okay, maybe I should.
Speaker B (03:51):
Yeah, no spoilers.
Don't give the whole story.
Sheesh.
Speaker A (03:54):
I'm sorry.
We'll give that away.
But.
So the reason I brought Aaron back on is
because he has a new series working on comingout.
All that good stuff.
So could you update my spooky friends?
Like, what's been happening?
Speaker B (04:08):
Yeah,
nothing.
It's just been very boring.
Crickets here?No,
there's been so much.
So I. I really, really, really, really want to
subtract voiceovers from my daily docket.
I'm a. I'm a daily voiceover artist, pro
voiceover artist.
For example, I'm the voice of UnitedHealthcare
right now.
I record everything back there, and I reallyenjoy it.
There was a time where it really paid thebills, but it's just been doing a little bit
(04:31):
of a nosedive, what with AI low ballers underbidders, the economy, blah, blah, blah.
So I've been trying desperately to.
To continue to just build up the authoring
career, and one of those ways is just simplywrite more books.
The Dissonance Saga.
I can't remember when we last talked how manybooks I had out at that time, but we had.
I wanted to write a trilogy.
(04:52):
Before I knew it, it doubled in size and
became a hexology of six books.
And. And it's the best thing I've everwritten.
I've written.
I'm working on book number 37 as we speak.
But not of Dissonance, by the way.
Dissonance is all done, but my 37th book.
But I love writing books.
I love writing a great story.
I love putting it out there.
It's like a Christmas gift, and then waiting
to see who's gonna snatch it up and open it.
(05:13):
You know, I. I love it.
I just absolutely love it.
So I did pen the Dissonance Saga.
I Penned a few standalones.
I penned a Christian dystopian saga called theEnd.
I penned a few more after that.
And I'm now working on a nonfiction book and a
new trilogy, which is a little like, after afashion, it's a spinoff from the Dissonant
saga.
There are repeat recurring returningcharacters, I should say from Dissonance in
(05:36):
that.
Speaker A (05:36):
Yeah.
Speaker B (05:37):
Called the Talisman series.
Speaker A (05:38):
Ooh, nice.
Very nice.
So could you refresh my spooky friends memory?
I mean, go back and listen to.
About the Dissonance,
you know, series, trilogy and stuff like that.
But could you kind of, you know, just give
them a high overview of what it was aboutagain?
Speaker B (05:55):
Yeah. So Dissonance is basically a story that has roots in 2026.
It starts next year in June of 2026.
These things descend from the sky.
We don'.
Know what they are.
They number about a million.
We fly our drones up to them and we see
they're not crafts, probes, ships or drones.
They are beings.
And they are hovering there in the sky about90 or 50ft above the ground, all over the
(06:18):
Earth.
About a million of them for 90 days.
We think maybe they're angelic messengersbecause they haven't attacked.
Nobody panic.
We'll find out in due time.
90 days goes by.
They all wake up at exactly the same time all
over the planet.
They start jetting out this bluish greenishvapor around themselves.
They look down and they hiss.
Never a good thing to be hissed at.
They attack.
Within 90 more days, 85% of all mankind hasbeen killed off, including all organic life.
(06:42):
We call them Gorgons because, like Medusa, theGorgon.
That's our common frame of reference.
We find you cannot ever lock eyes with them.
If you do that, it's all over.
They have a telepathic paralytic, so they will
immobilize you with their minds.
They will eat you at their leisure.
And you're gonna feel you're conscious andsentient.
You're gonna feel every agonizing bite withoutthe ability to fight back.
(07:07):
So. Awful way to go.
And the story is really a human survival storyset from 2026 all the way up to 2045, grounded
in reality right here on Earth as.
As we survive and try to fight back.
Speaker A (07:19):
Yeah, I love that.
And you know what's interesting to me is, and
this is kind of a question for you too, one ofthe things I was watching this documentary on
writers and stuff and some of the bigger timewriters.
And one of the things, this writer, he.
He came into an office,
and, you know, he gave him the manuscript, andthey're reading through the manuscript, and he
(07:42):
goes, how do you come up with this stuff?
Where do you get this from?
Like, and the guy's like, I'm a writer.
He's like, yeah, so that'd be my question toyou.
Like, how do you come up with this stuff?I mean, what kind of motivates you?
Are you, like, at a. I don't know, a zoo?And you're like,
(08:03):
huh, that'd be really cool if a giraffe could,I don't know, have a spike tongue and.
And, you know, immobilize people or, you know,I don't know, keep going.
Speaker B (08:15):
I just got my next series.
Yeah, it's so funny because, you know, I dovendor markets all the time.
I sell my books at vendor markets.
They're like craft fairs, you know, and book
fairs.
And I'm.
I'm asked frequently, how do you have all thisin your head?
And,
you know, they're asking me this while we'reboth perched over a table loaded with all
these books that I've written and published.
(08:37):
And I. And I get to say, well, I don't.
I mean, they're.
They're all right here now.
You know, they're not in my head anymore.
You just come up with a great idea, and then
you kind of, You.
You nurture it, you play with it, you harness
it, and see what.
Where you can go with it and.
And write.
Now, I will say I am a very organic style ofwriter.
There's two styles of writers.
There's.
There's a pantser.
(08:57):
They fly by the seat of their pants.
It's very organic.
And there's a planner or a plotter,
and those types are much more, you know, indexcards and flow charts and cross your eyes
and.your t's, you know, kinds of writers.
And those guys really have to plot everything
out.
I do have some outline.
Ish natures about me, but ultimately, I really
(09:18):
like to write organically, and I think thathelps me write faster.
Speaker A (09:21):
I don't know.
Yeah, and that's really interesting to me.
Now, let me ask you this.
When you were coming up with the Gorgons and
everything like that,
and you had a. Again, a million differentthings, you could, you know, they could, I
don't know, set people on fire.
They could, you know, just rip people's fleshoff.
They.
(09:41):
You know what I'm saying?
But it's like, okay,
how do I choose the best way?
Because I know there are some writers forexample, get, you know, from the world of
nature how things attack.
Like there's a, like a sea snake supposedly
where,
you know, the, it would lay on the bottom andtake little bites of a little bites of a
(10:03):
little bites.
And I think it's dead.
And then it will just pop up and pop.
And it's.
Poison is so lethal.
You know, whatever attacked it, that was dead,right?
And I'm like,
that's kind of cool.
You know what I mean?
Like, or like with alligators, with deathrolls, a lot of people think chom chomp,
chomp, or gator croc, whatever it is, chomp,chomp, chomp.
(10:25):
They eat you.
No, they drag you down to the bottom, roll you
over, then put you in like maybe a couplerocks or some logs and they just let you
marinate and then they come back.
Snack time.
Speaker B (10:39):
Unless you're a zebra.
If you're a zebra, they're going to eat you
alive right on the surface while you feelevery bite.
So maybe a croc is more like a gorgon in thatregard.
Speaker A (10:47):
Yeah, yeah.
So that's, that's really interesting to me.
And then,
but my, my thing is, how do you then say I getit.
It's, you know, like you, when you watch amovie, like I always joke with Fast and
Furious.
If you've seen any of those movies wherethey're like running cars over weird bridges
and you're like, that can't.
What is going on?
(11:08):
Right.
The physics of it is not.
But that's not the point.
The point is it's fun.
It's a popcorn movie.
Your brain ghost.
I take my brain.
And I said,
right, right.
But in your case with sci fi, you really can'tdo that because someone but as sci fi nerds
who's.
I'm a sci fi nerd is going to be like, really,
(11:29):
Aaron?
Really?
So with the gorgons, when you were thinking ofthat, was there any scientific or technology
technology where you're like,
yeah,
that's interesting.
Speaker B (11:43):
Not based in current zoological, you know, categories.
There's nothing like that that's inspired byanimals as we know them today or the
categories thereof.
I just, I remember when I first started
writing dissonance, they actually were calledDruids and they bore far too uncanny of a
resemblance to a cross between Nazgul andDementor.
(12:04):
And so, you know, Ben done.
Ben done.
I didn't want to, I wanted to reinvent thewheel to a certain extent.
So I, I didn't have the name Gorgon yet, but Idid Want them to be flesh and blood so that
they could actually be destroyed because, youknow, otherwise there's no hope.
And I, I was trying to think back into therecesses of my mind the things that really
scared me, particularly as a kid.
(12:25):
What were the things that just, you know, like
the, the creature under the bed kind of thing.
And I'll never forget being a little guy.
I was only eight, I think.
And the Ray Harryhausen stop motionphotography claymation Clash of the Titans
came out with Harry Hamlin as Perseus andBurgess Mered and all those other stars.
And I,
I will never forget when Medusa, it's myfavorite part of the movie to this day, when
(12:48):
they go into.
I forget what the name of the isle is, but
they pass Cerberus and they go into Medusa'slair.
She zeros one of Pers.
Perseus fellow soldiers.
She comes into frame.
It's dark in there.
She comes into frame.
Her eyes are eerily overlit, almost like these
green luminescent flashlights.
And there's this high dissonant shriek thatplays while she comes right at you.
(13:11):
And it was so terrifying, I had to run out ofthe room because I thought I'm going to get
frozen if I even watch this on tv.
It was so dreadful and realistic.
And I was like, that conjured up so much fear
in me from a young age.
Now there are representations for things likethat with like, I have a nine and six year old
son.
You'd think I'd remember the name the Enderman
(13:32):
in Minecraft.
Right?
You can't look at an Enderman because he putsall these negative thoughts in your mind.
It's similar to that in some respects.
Although these are predators, they're like
space octopus or space lions and that justhappens to be their natural evolutionary gift
that they can use to kill you off.
So perfect match.
And they're frightening as heck.
Speaker A (13:51):
Yeah, yeah.
Now, one of the biggest things about being an
author is everybody, for lack of a betterword, steals from one another.
Whether you, whether you know it or not.
Right?You just.
There's so much stuff you just sometimes don'tknow, like,
oh ****, that was in Independence Day.
Or that was in Mars Attacks.
Or that was in 2001 Space Odyssey.
(14:14):
Like, come on,
it's just gonna happen.
But when you're writing,
how do you avoid those common sci fi tropesand put a new spin on them?
Because that's really hard.
Right?
It's the same trope is the big hero.
Hi, I'm Max Power.
And I'm going to save the world.
(14:36):
He's got muscles and hair and he's good.
And you're like, yeah, I want to write that.
But really,
you know.
Or you don't want to.
So how do you get through those tropes whenyou're writing and going, ah, that's horrible.
Speaker B (14:49):
Yeah, it's a great question.
Ecclesiastes says there's nothing new under
the sun.
Right.
Like, everything's been done before.
I get it.
I am, unfortunately, or fortunately, I'm muchmore cinematically inspired than I am
literarily inspired.
So if you read Dissonance, you're going to seeI wrote it very cinematically.
That's why it was adapted to the screen soeasily in a screenplay format.
(15:11):
But I. I wrote it that way.
And I'm thinking, you know, when the Gorgonsarrive, there could be comparisons made to
Independence day, when the UFOs come andthey're hanging there in the sky and there's a
countdown until they attack.
Very similar strains or threads are found indissonance to that.
But the way I differentiated it is these guysdidn't come down.
Yes, they've got a giant mothership up thereout in space, but they descended bodily
(15:33):
through the clouds, all million of them.
They're not in ships or probes or crafts.
They're not coming down to shoot their green,
you know, lasers at us.
They're just these, you know, partially
humanoid organic life forms that are driftingdown out of the clouds.
And so therein has a little bit ofdifferential right there.
But, you know, an avid reader of Lord of theRings, I'm a massive Lord of the Rings fan,
not that you could tell.
(15:54):
And there's tips of the hat to Tolkien inDissonance, there's tips of the hat to Stephen
King.
There's.
I pay homage to things that I remember frommovies or from other literature as a way of
saying, you inspired me.
I would love to tell JRR Tolkien that to hisface.
I cannot.
So I can only do it literally.
Speaker A (16:13):
A little awkward to dig him up.
Speaker B (16:16):
Very awkward, yeah.
And they can't talk back, so he can't say,
you're welcome, and just be plain weird.
Speaker A (16:21):
Yeah.
So the other question I have for you,
I.
Has become a hot buzz topic.
Right.
More. They're going to be more and moremovies.
There was a movie that just came is coming outwith Chris Pratt that I think is really
original,
where this AI judge,
(16:43):
basically,
it's kind of like Minority Report,
if you know what that is.
I love that movie where you're guilty before
you're proven innocent.
Right.
And you gotta prove you're innocent.
So there's a new movie coming out I just saw
yesterday.
I thought it was really, really interesting.
And this guy through the movie has to prove
(17:04):
he's innocent.
Like the AI's already said, oh, you're guilty.
Or yeah,
but I will give you a chance and I will giveyou time to prove it.
So that kind of reminded me.
It was funny I was thinking about you because
it kind of reminded me of what you were sayingwith the time with the Gorgon coming down.
There's a time on this, you know, I think it'slike an hour and a half.
Yes, of course,
(17:25):
the movie is an hour and a half.
So he's got to figure that out.
And I. But I just thought it's fascinatingbecause he's going through all these things.
Who killed my wife?
Who killed my wife?Oh, wait a minute.
Is it that guy?Is it this guy?
Is it that guy?And then his guiltiness goes up to it, reaches
a certain point.
Oh, he's that.
So I like that.
Yeah. However,
like in your book, I don't know if you dealwith this a lot, but I imagine you will.
(17:47):
Moving forward, how do you deal with theethical implications of certain sci fi themes?
Let's. Let's be honest with God, creation,evolution, on and on and on.
And things such as artificial intelligence orgenetic engineering is becoming a big thing.
Cyborgs are right around the corner, people.
(18:09):
And we have cyborgs right now.
People who lost the leg, unfortunately.
Maybe an accident or over being a soldier.
Over in a war.
Yeah, they're cyborgs.
They're the beginning of cyborgs.
So how do you deal with that without feelinglike you're disparaging something or maybe
(18:30):
kind of being like cuckoo?
Speaker B (18:34):
That's a great question.
I think one of the nice things about sciencefiction is that it is fiction.
It's basically an imaginary view of a relevanttopic.
And so I think one of the best quotes ever inany movie or literature, because obviously
Michael Crichton had it in his book.
I believe.
I don't remember.
It's been a long time since I've read it.
But Dr. Ian Malcolm, Jeff Goldblum says your
(18:56):
scientists were so preoccupied with whether ornot they could, they didn't stop to think if
they should.
Speaker A (19:00):
Correct.
Speaker B (19:00):
And absolutely love that line.
That's a dilemma that a lot of people will
face in technology,
particularly AI.
It's a great relevant question to ask in light
of AI, genetic engineering.
But the nice thing with fiction, and
particularly science fiction, is you can takeit off ramp from the harsh realities of the
current predicament or the current dilemma andimagine what it could be like if you either
(19:22):
solved it or it ran amok.
Right.
And then you just kind of explore that to a
pretend, imaginary sense.
I think it's good fodder for creativity,
number one, but also figuring out, you know,how you navigate it.
With AI My thoughts and my position remainsthe same.
If we talked about it in the last time.
I'm not a fan of AI.
Speaker A (19:42):
Yeah.
Speaker B (19:43):
I posted a video recently where I actually ran an experimental prompt on Grok
for ideas for the Talisman series, and itgenerated five of them.
Gave me, you know, moral ambiguity, strugglesand character breakdowns and blah, blah, blah.
Five of them.
I said, I don't like this.
Okay, try it again.
Give me five more.
I got the other five.
(20:03):
Didn't like them.
Man, these suck.
Tried it one last time.
Five more.
Hated it.
It was stupid.
And then I. I just finally said, you know
what?I'm gonna do this myself.
And I. And I went back.
And I love what I came up with.
Granted, I love it even more because there'scharacters from dissonance that come back in
the.
In the Talisman series.
It's the dissonance verse or the Ryan verse,you know,
(20:24):
or the Aaronverse.
I love that.
But I love what I came up with instead of AI.
Genetic engineering,
I think, is a really polarizing topic as well,and I think it's great fodder for exploitation
in a novel.
I. I actually just wrote book number 35, I
believe was called the Phoenix Experiment.
And it is.
It deals with AI, Sentient AI gone wrong, runamok.
(20:48):
But you also have.
It's kind of like Ash vs Bishop from Alien and
Aliens.
So one is good, one is bad, and they are thepolar opposites.
And it's really interesting to see whathappens when you pit them against each other.
One's going to win, and then the other is.
And then the other is.
And who's going to win out in the end?I loved addressing that.
It wasn't a referendum on AI, but I reallyliked addressing it.
Speaker A (21:10):
Yeah, yeah.
So as an author,
you struggle with some big questions of like,where is this going?
Is this going to be?
You know, there's a bright future and justeverybody stick together,
or is this going to be, yeah, we're going to**** and it's going to get worse.
(21:31):
So what big questions are you exploring withthe distance?
Well, Yuri Distance series and Talismanseries, obviously.
But are you exploring through the nature ofreality and what happens to society facing a
crisis?
Because this is a crisis.
Like, this is like, I equated to.
(21:52):
And not to cut you off, Aaron, but I equatedto.
And unfortunately, remember when 911 happened,every concretely,
everybody, one way or another was involved.
I don't care if you were a farmer in Iowa, you
know, tending your crops, or you were someguy,
you know, I don't know, hanging out at a frathouse, you know,
(22:16):
having a good old time.
That to me is kind of.
I don't want to say that's it, because that's
not it.
But, like, having these Gorgons come down and
seeing your doom happening before you.
That's exactly what happened in there.
You saw the buildings, right?
It wasn't like, oh, they went down.
(22:37):
Bam.
No, it was like, smash.
Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa.
A plane hit it.
Whoa.
What's going on?
Oh, another plane hit.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
You know, and it was happening real time.
And you're watching this going, going, what's
going on?
And then the buildings come down kind of likethe Gorgons.
And like, how do you, you know, this is acrisis.
Like, how do you write that to make the.
(23:00):
Have the audience kind of understand,
like, this is the nature of reality and what'sgoing to happen in this crisis?
Like,
yeah,
well,
one of the questions.
Speaker B (23:11):
For just going back to the Phoenix experiment is can technology and technology
heal grief?Because one of these days someone is going to
come up with some technological invention thateverybody's going to rally behind and say,
hey, now we don't have to be sad anymore.
Grieving doctor Dan Allender says alladdiction is failure to grieve.
We have to grieve, cleanse, and go throughthose four stages of grief.
(23:34):
So important.
So can technology handle grief Isn't so muchthe question or heal grief?
Isn't so much the question.
Should technology heal grief?
Is the question.
Should we or should we just allow ourselves togrieve?
We don't have to anesthetize and take care ofeverything and medicate our pain away.
With 9 11.
I remember it like it was yesterday.
I wrote forecast.
(23:55):
It's a 911 historical fiction thriller that
sees 911 entirely prevented.
It never happens, and all those lives are
saved.
I wrote it very cathartically.
It was a very therapeutic piece of work for meto write because I would love to a world where
that doesn't happen.
It's not possible anymore.
It is Part of history.
It's.
(24:16):
It's inexorable from our history, but it gives
you a little bit of a way to remember, toreflect.
I think what's sad about today in our currentcancel culture is things get.
Not just put in a closet, but they get erasedand removed because somebody's gonna get
triggered somewhere.
It's like, with all due respect to people who
have maybe lost somebody, you wanna besensitive to that.
(24:39):
Yes. But we don't have to completely whitewashus so that nobody gets hurt.
What doesn't kill us makes us stronger.
Martin Luther King said that.
And so, you know, I think that we need to dealwith some of the emotions around 9 11.
Some of the emotions around AI not just go,oh, it'll be okay, and, you know, push it
aside.
There's all kinds of moral quandaries we're
(25:00):
always going to have to deal with.
I love how fiction gives us.
Gives us a way to.
To encounter those and handle them.
Speaker A (25:07):
Absolutely.
And so when you're also doing this, do you
ever take PA to see, like, is any of thisplausible or do you just like, keep kind of
going and being like, it's side.
No, I mean, come on.
Speaker B (25:22):
Yeah. I wrote the Slide.
The Slide.
Boy,
you talk about being cinematically inspired.
The Slide came to me in a fusion of, I don't
know if you remember Multiplicity.
That movie with Michael Keaton.
Speaker A (25:33):
Yes. Yeah.
Speaker B (25:35):
So that one and.
And the Fly.
The Fly with Jeff Goldblum.
So, you know, you put them together and you
get, you know, teleportation, and things couldgo wrong.
It was just going to be a novel about whatcould go wrong.
It was almost going to be a referendum on thedangers of teleportation technology.
I think there are inherent dangers there, but,you know, we're not there yet.
That's what the novel was going to focus on.
(25:56):
But I thought, you know,
it's a little too far off into the future.
I don't know that people will be able torelate to this, but they can relate to
impending doom.
So here you have a protagonist who has
developed much like Jeff Goldblum in hisapartment, teleportation technology and
chambers that are like Jeff Goldblum's pods.
And the teleportation is a success.
(26:17):
He goes through tests.
He tests his dog, he tests birds.
He tests, finally himself.
Musters up the courage to test himself.
Very reminiscent of the fly.
There's no creature that gets in there and
gets accidentally spliced together.
But then you start to see the whole picture of
is this Relevant.
It is relevant.
If a supermassive black hole is on its way to
the Milky Way galaxy and is going to destroyeverything,
(26:39):
could we teleport somewhere else, away fromEarth, away from the Milky Way galaxy?
And so that set a very cool precedent in mymind for.
For imagining the scope of what teleportationtechnology could do.
Speaker A (26:52):
Yeah. Yeah. So speaking on that technology and maybe some themes and some
social commentary in your.
In your books,
like, what, I guess, do you have?I don't want to say an agenda.
That's a wrong word.
But, like, what does your story say about the
(27:13):
current world and the future of humanity?
Like, is that something you go in being like,yep, this is where I'm going, or does this
kind of just flows and just comes out, youknow?
You know?
Speaker B (27:29):
Yeah, I think.
I think it's a mixture of both.
I mean, I don't intend any of my books to be areferendum on anything.
Speaker A (27:35):
Okay.
Speaker B (27:35):
But, yeah, there's.
There are definitely social issues that we all
face.
And I think, you know, right now, almost every
single one of my novels has a kernel ofthematic depth in it that I think you could
apply to whatever we're going through rightnow.
And that kernel is hope.
You. You subtract hope from any situation, and
people are bereft of willingness to survive,to push through, to win.
(27:59):
I love what President Snow says in the HungerGames.
He says.
He's talking to Seneca Crane, the original
game maker, and he says, hope.
It is the only thing stronger than fear.
Fear keeps us in our place.
Fear turns to anger.
Anger turns to hate.
Hate turns to suffering.
The prophet Yoda said that fear keeps usimmobilized.
(28:20):
Hope gets us out of that rigor mortis andencourages us to take risks and get out there
and try to last and survive and thrive.
So, yes, there's a kernel of truth in all ofmy novels that's.
That really centers around hope.
Without hope, everything sucks, and it will
suck forever.
With hope, you can take action.
You can do monumental things.
(28:41):
There is a way out of this current conundrum.
I really value hope being a central coremessage of any of my novels.
Speaker A (28:49):
Yeah, but then how do you.
Because conflict, intention,
that's part of being an author.
You can't just have everybody, like I said,
skipping along, and unicorns and lollipops,everybody's sharing picnics.
What do you do?Because this is very true in today's world.
There's the right and the left.
Right and, well, the middle.
(29:10):
Conservative, whatever you want to say it.
And this is in a Political podcast, obviously.
And there's always someone who says, like you
said, hey, there's hope.
God, we can get through it.
And everybody, there's another person saying,
nope, we're never going to get through this.
And then there's a third person saying, only
if it's done my way.
Right, Right.
There's hope.
(29:31):
Way.
So if you do it my way.
And I, I take this a lot from I stopped
watching it, but like Walking Dead and stuff,Walking Dead was about, okay, there's a common
goal.
There's zombies, they're getting worse, wegotta kill the zombies.
However, in there, there's different powerplays.
There's different kingdoms who are trying toestablish themselves.
(29:52):
Right.
Because they feel what they need to do is thebest solution.
Right.
So how do you balance that in your books when
you're writing about, okay, the Gorgon'scoming down, maybe somebody.
And maybe you already have that because Iapologize, I haven't read all the book yet.
But is there people in there who like, ah,maybe they're not so bad.
Maybe we can use them or something.
(30:13):
Maybe we can manipulate that.
Speaker B (30:15):
Yeah, well, one of the central messages of the dissonant saga really is that
mankind is always the worst enemy of mankind.
Yes.
It's an alien invasion saga.
I mean, that's inexorable.
It is an alien invasion saga.
And so you have to deal with these accursed
nuisances of beings that are here and they ownthe planet now.
You have to deal with that.
And that's unpleasant as it is.
(30:35):
But what's even more unpleasant is that we've
got this humanity on the brink of extinctionafter 16 years of alien occupation.
You would think by that time we would all beworking together.
We would all be, you know, getting along andworking so hard to kick these things to the
curb.
But it just doesn't happen that way.
There are people always, always, always selfabsorbed, putting themselves forward, you
(30:58):
know, throwing monkey, monkey wrenches intothe works.
Speaker A (31:00):
Yes.
Speaker B (31:01):
And we have to deal with them.
And so it's kind of like the Rodney King cry.
Can we all get along?
You know,
and it's just hard when we, when we don't,that becomes the worst problem.
Speaker A (31:11):
So, yeah.
And I think that's something that again, it's
kind of a trope per se.
There's always a guy like,
you know, since we're both movie people, I'lluse Die Hard.
One of my favorite scenes in Die Hard.
I know it's not sci fi, but the sales guy goes
in there and tries to Convince Hans Gruberthat he's.
Oh, he's his friend, and he's gonna helpeverything and he'll smooth this out and
(31:34):
they'll get their money.
And Don McLean's like, no, you idiot, he's
going to kill you.
Speaker B (31:40):
Yeah. What are you doing?
Speaker A (31:41):
He thinks you.
You know, whatever, you know, it's too much or
you're going to get us both killed.
And there's always people like that, right?
The person just,
why are you attacking this, whether it be aGorgon or sage or whatever, when you know it's
not going to work yet in your mind, you thinkit works because whatever your delusion or
(32:02):
anything, and I think that's an interestingthing, you know, as an author, like, do you
put that in the book?
Do you make it a main thing?Do you just say, like,
okay, you know, how am I going.
How am I going to fit that in?
Because that's important.
Right?
Just people like that, we.
We meet them every day.
Yep.
Speaker B (32:19):
Yeah. There are team players, and there's just lone rangers, and you just have
to kind of decide and hope for the best thatwe're all going to work together.
I think one of the greatest things is there isa character in the dissonance saga in
particular, that basically turns sides.
He doesn't know that he's necessarily on the
wrong side, but he comes back.
And so there's that arc that's always sorewarding in the end, where you think you've
(32:41):
lost this accomplice, this ally,
this person who was faithful to you andeverybody else for so long.
And then that arc brings them back, and it's.
It's restorative.
It's very, very redemptive to see them comeback.
It's not always going to be that way.
There are going to be people who are.
They're won over to the dark side, you know,and they just don't get it.
(33:02):
And you are so mad and perplexed why theydon't get it.
You know?Yeah, everybody else knows that this person is
evil.
Why are you supporting them?
And.
And they don't understand that.
No, they're good and you're evil.
Speaker A (33:14):
Yeah. Right.
And, you know, the.
The most common with that is Darth Vader and
Luke Skywalker.
Right.
Is there's still good in him.
And everybody's like, he just wiped out a
planet of innocent people.
No, no, no. There's still some good in him.
No.
Yeah, I know that.
Speaker B (33:30):
Even before that.
Remember Anakin's dilemma?
Speaker A (33:34):
Yeah.
Speaker B (33:34):
He's talking with.
With Padme and she says the situation.
Oh, no, no. He's talking with Obi Wan inRevenge of the Sith, and he says, obi Wan
says, you know, the Sith are evil, orChancellor Palpatine is evil.
And Anakin goes, in my opinion, the Jedi areevil.
You know,
Adolf Hitler thought he was right.
He thought he was the good guy.
(33:56):
So, yeah, there's people that are justdeluded.
Speaker A (33:58):
Yeah, there's just people who think they're right and, you know, all these severe
tragedies in the world, everyone.
I was right.
You know, you can go down the line.
No, I'm right.
So we're nerding out here.
I love it.
Of a nerd podcast.
So can you tell me,
Aaron, about or share a moment with me fromyour personal life that inspired a scene or
(34:22):
character in your book?
Speaker B (34:23):
Well, I. I mean, the first thing that I jump to is the proposal between Allie
and Jet.
It's a spoiler.
But, you know, this was released in May of2024.
So by now, it's whatever.
It's. It's not perfect.
It's full of,
you know, silliness, and it's clumsy.
And so I look at my own proposal a little bitthat way with my wife.
(34:44):
So I like the fact that things aren't squeakyclean.
And that's the way that dissonance is.
It's. It's more Star wars with oil drippingout of the panelization of the Millennium
Falcon,
as opposed to squeaky clean, white, antisepticwalls of the starship Enterprise.
And there's not a trace of dust anywhere.
I like dirt under the nails.
And I like the colonial Marines from Aliens.
(35:06):
Grimy.
So that would be one.
I'm a natural cynic.
Some people are a natural blonde.
I'm a natural cynic.
And that's really mirrored in Jet Cameron JettShipley in Dissonance, Volume one reality.
And he has to make that move to trust.
As the series goes on.
There's too many to list because I constantlyreference in.
In the saga how he's a cynic, and that's verymuch a reflection of me as well.
Speaker A (35:29):
Yeah,
and I hear you.
I'm a realistic, positive person.
You know, like, something's probably gonna gowrong, but let's.
Let's work it out.
One of the biggest things for writers is youwrite a scene.
Oh, man, this is the greatest thing I've everwritten.
I'm gonna have a beer or champagne orwhatever, and then you come back the next
(35:52):
morning and go, what the hell did I just do?
How do you.
How do you cut that out?How do you take that?
You know, just.
Oh, my God, that just hurtful,
painful thing to be like, I gotta cut thisseed.
How do you come across that?
Speaker B (36:08):
I'm just gonna say, you know, there are some people that struggle with writer's
block, and there are other people that arenaysayers and say it doesn't exist.
And I can't stand it when people say that,because of course it exists.
It's a phenomenon.
You can't write.
You can't.
I struggled with writer's block for the
beginning of the Talisman series.
I wasn't sure which direction I wanted it to
go, but to.
The only time that.
I mean, the time that sticks out in my head
(36:30):
the most is when I wrote Forkast.
And the protagonist, Roland Bishop,
is struck by lightning.
And I had him go in a direction where he.
He prevents a crime, but he does so in a verysuperheroistic fashion.
And he's got lightning in his body, so nowhe's able to electrocute someone.
He's able.
He's welling up with blue fire inside him, and
(36:53):
it's.
He's combusting.
And I thought,
do I want to go?I mean, with all the superhero fatigue that
we're experiencing,
Marvel and all that stuff and DC andeverything, do I really want to go down this
path?But I just followed it.
I followed it, and it was exactly the rightdirection to go.
But as I'm writing and I'm going, I don'tknow, dude.
(37:13):
Is this really, like, wait a minute.
But by the time you get to the end of thebook, you go, that Aaron Ryan guy is
brilliant.
You know, because this needed to happen where
I was struggling with this writing part inorder for this massive, awesome conclusion to
happen.
And Roland Bishop, in and of himself as asingle, solitary human,
would not have been able feasibly to.
(37:35):
To thwart the plans of 19 hijackers acrossfour different planes.
He wouldn't have been able to.
But Roland Bishop, imbued with incredible
powers.
Yes.
So he did need to have some powers.
Speaker A (37:47):
Yeah. And. And that's.
That's interesting to me because,
again,
having certain powers can be.
In a book, you have fun, but you look throughthe care as a writer, you gotta.
You can't think about, well, I'm gonna givehim powers.
You got to think about what those powers mean.
Speaker B (38:05):
Right, Exactly.
What are they for?
Speaker A (38:06):
What is he going to do? So, like, like,
obviously,
a lot of superheroes, they have so much.
I mean, being a Jedi Knight.
Well, I'M gonna go back to this.
I always say this.
I'm sorry to go off on a little tangent here,but I would hate to be Batman.
I would absolutely hate it.
(38:26):
Because there's no way you get out of that.
You're trapped forever because you're like,oh, I'm gonna take a vacation,
Joker.
Starting something new again back.
And then, you know, that's why I always likewhere a lot of graphic novels go with the
character and maybe you will do this.
(38:47):
I don't know if you do this with character
right now, where you just finally,
like, there's the Dark Knight series, DarkKnight Returns, where Batman's this older
gentleman and he's insane and he's literallyjust killing people left and right, basically.
Or hurting them.
You know, I should say.
I don't think he's killing people.
I have to go back.
(39:07):
But he's hurting people like, yeah, badly.
And, you know, because he's just gone.
His mind is just frazzled because he's just.
You know what I mean?I think that's really interesting in the
character, right, that gets to that point,like, where do they.
Where do they stop?Where?
It's just like, how many people.
(39:27):
Can I say?
Speaker B (39:28):
Yeah, the humanity of them.
I think you have to visit that humanity
because you need to keep the charactergrounded and attainable to your human readers.
One of the things, though, that I can't stand,and I think movies sometimes go far, too far
with this is,
you know, you can't see behind my door there,but I have Gandalf the Grays, big brown staff.
(39:49):
It's life size.
It's incredible.
It's thick, it's heavy.
Speaker A (39:51):
Nice.
Speaker B (39:52):
Gandalf was very humanized.
Ian McKellen's portrayal of him was spot on.
But, you know, he's bound to a script that he
has to.
He has to comply with.
And he was just.
He was very humanized.
They took some of his best lines andattributed them to Aragorn or whoever else.
They subtracted him of some of his power andmade him more of a.
(40:12):
Of a consultant, you know, in some respects.
And no, this guy was.
This guy was one of the maiar.
He was 3000 years old and he was incredibly
powerful.
So he was a spirit, you know, trapped inside a
body.
Especially when he came back as Gandalf theWhite,
you know, he was even more powerful.
And so oftentimes people can err, the creators
(40:33):
can err in making them too human.
And then you lose the majesty or the abilityor the.
The magnanimity of that that character,because you've brought them so down to earth.
It's necessary because then it keeps merelating to that character.
This is why in my sci fi, I. I'm a sci fienthusiast at heart.
(40:53):
That's my branding and I incorporate a lot ofheart because I want the human struggle at the
center, whoever it is.
I want you to relate.
Go. I get that.
And that keeps the reader engaged.
Speaker A (41:05):
Yeah, absolutely.
So I always love asking authors this, whatcharacter have you written that you just never
put him in a series like I want to put him in,but he's just not developed or whatever it
might be.
Is there any character where you're like, oh,
maybe.
I don't know.
Speaker B (41:24):
Yeah, I'd have to do a deep dive on.
On all of them.
I don't know.
I love all of my characters, but especiallythe ones in Dissonance and the end.
I love the androids in.
In the Phoenix Experiment because they are, ofcourse, synthetic people.
You know, they're not.
That's the wrong word.
They're synthetic life forms.
And that itself is the wrong word as well,
because they're not life forms.
They're synthetic machines.
(41:44):
I think they're so incredibly alluring and
mysterious and interesting,
but I don't.
I certainly couldn't do a stand standalone
novel on Stygius Cryptus, the.
The anthro meta model from.
From the Phoenix Experiment, or BaryonisTalicus, the opposing anthro meta model in the
Phoenix Experiment.
They just don't have that depth of life orbackstory or character to exploit.
Speaker A (42:07):
Yeah, yeah.
The other question, and this is my favorite
question to ask author,
is there anything that you wish you wouldhave?
Rich?Is there anything out there you went, man?
Speaker B (42:19):
Yeah. Yeah, definitely the Lord of the Rings and definitely the Hunger Games.
I love both.
Speaker A (42:24):
Why?
Speaker B (42:25):
Well, the Lord of the Rings is the first thing that I remember reading as a. As a
young teenager, in fact, probably even earlierthan that.
I just remember being so blown away.
Every page was like, what?It was so grand and deep and wide and high and
long.
All the characters, you loved them.
All the lands you love them, all the
languages, you loved them.
Everything was perfect about Lord of the
(42:46):
Rings, the Hunger Games.
I just love that struggle unto.
Almost unto despair.
This is where hope meets its match in despair.
Because President Snow's got all the power.
And this is a sick, twisted thing that they dothat they've put under the guise of nobility,
they process these poor chosen, conscriptedwarriors that aren't warriors to kill each
(43:09):
other.
You know, fight to the death.
And there's no way out for them, so they just
have to be.
They have to dump in.
They have to jump into that.
That water and be carried down the tide and
just do what they must.
It's such a compelling story, though.
And you just love the victory in the end.
Speaker A (43:23):
Yeah, right.
And I think that that's truly amazing withstories like that, where they bring you.
I was just rewatching the extended version ofLord of the Rings, Fellowship of the Rings.
Speaker B (43:40):
Is there any other version? I don't think so.
Speaker A (43:41):
Yeah, there are some things in there where I'm like, okay, really?
It's kind of like they're having a hamsandwich together.
Not that they are, but you know what I mean?
It's like a scene where.
Hi, how are you?
I'm doing well.
Do you know that Lord of Oregon, Blah, blah,
blah.
Okay,
good.
He likes blue.
You know what I mean?I'm not saying it's that simple, but you know
(44:03):
what I mean?It's like, did that really need to be in
there?That I know that some guy, like, stepped on a
frog one day and, like, you know, like, okay,that's.
Speaker B (44:13):
J.R.R. tolkien would take, like, three paragraphs to describe a rock, you know?
Speaker A (44:17):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker B (44:18):
But he.
He believed in his world so much.
That's why.
Speaker A (44:20):
Exactly.
I always say one of the biggest things is I'm
a big Philip K. **** fan and a Rod Serlingfan.
I would do anything just to be a fly on thewall.
Like, Twilight Zone to me is still, to thisday amazing.
The.
The epitome, the gold standard.
(44:40):
Because it's, you know, he.
Back in the day, you don't have a lot offacts.
You don't have.
Whatever.
And you got to think of, like, what if I havea camera that turns people and, you know,
shows them, like, what's going to happen inthe future?
You know what I mean?Like, oh, you take a picture and then the
lady's flying out the window or whatever, andyou're like.
And then it happens,
(45:01):
you know?And one of, like, one of my favorite scenes,
and this is just genius,
where there is this criminal and he's in.
And.
Sorry, going off a tangent really good reallyquickly, but there's this criminal, and he's
in this place which he.
Which he thinks is heaven because he's winning
at gambling, he's got all the dames, and he'sgot money and liquor.
(45:23):
He's robbing places and getting all thismoney.
And then at the end,
he goes, hey,
I don't think I'm supposed to be here.
This is.
This is heaven.
I'm not supposed to be here.
I'm a scumbag and everything.
And the guy goes, why do you think this washeaven?
And then you realize he's in hell.
You know?
Speaker B (45:43):
Yeah.
Speaker A (45:44):
You know what I mean? Because that's.
And I love that, you know, that line of, like,what do you.
Why do you think you're in heaven?You know, what makes you think you're in
heaven?
And, you know, and if you think about it,that's very true to life.
If just everything goes right for you.
A lot of people, oh, that'd be nice.
But after a while, you'd be like, oh, my God,you know, enough's enough,
(46:07):
right?
It just.
Because there's no challenge.
There's no nothing going on.
And I think that's really interesting to like
your books.
You know, there's a challenge of these Gorgons
coming down.
Like,
if they just said, hey, how you doing?We're gonna.
We're gonna fix everything.
We're gonna fix your medical,
your,
you know, your infrastructure.
(46:27):
You'd be, oh, this is great,
by the way.
We make great pizzas.
So here you go, too.
You need to be like,
okay.
Speaker B (46:35):
Yeah.
Speaker A (46:36):
It'd be funny, though, but not necessarily what people want to read.
So let's talk about your new series, andwhat's that all about?
Speaker B (46:45):
So the Talisman series.
So this is something where I know that I
totally differ from a lot of authors outthere.
I like to design the COVID first.
So if I get an idea for a new series, it's
usually the title and the COVID and I willenvision the COVID and I'll design it and
basically,
like, reverse engineer it.
That gives me something.
It gives me forward momentum.
It gives me a trajectory and a goal to work
(47:06):
forward to and basically, you know, advancetowards.
As a dissonance aficionado, I mean, I wrote myown series, and I love it.
This, I always think, is over, and then itcomes calling again.
But the protagonists that are in dissonance onhere, all these guys, some of them are going
to make their way into the Talisman seriesbecause it's set in the same earth,
(47:29):
it's set in the same time frame, it's theirbeloved characters by many.
And so it's really hard to get away and kindof exercise yourself from a story that you
love.
I had a hard time envisioning what it wasgoing to be until I realized there's a great
character in this saga whose backstory I havenot mined Enough or properly.
And so he can be the new protagonist of theTalisman series.
(47:52):
So the Talisman series is one of thoseprotagonists.
He makes a cosmic deal with some.
Some strange forces.
You'll find out who they are by book 3.
He has lost his wife.
He's a former war hero.
He's lost his wife.
And these cosmic forces have offered him abargain.
Save 1000 lives and we will return your wifeto you.
We will resurrect her from the dead.
(48:12):
And so he is an indentured servant in this
role of the Talisman.
He's imbued with these powers.
He's got a suit.
He leaves these trinkets behind,
you know, everywhere he goes, when he rescuessomeone, they are the Talisman, you know,
figures.
But unbeknownst to him, there is.
And then he finds out eventually there is acounter force that used to be a talisman but
(48:34):
renounced his charge.
And so his love stayed dead.
And he is bitter, he's angry, and he wants
revenge on not just the Talisman, but the.
They're called the Aetarium Axis, who, you
know, bestowed these powers upon these poor,witless humans.
He wants revenge against him and them.
And so he's going to kill them.
Kill him, gain his powers, kill them.
(48:55):
And so he's being stalked by a reporter.
He's being stalked by this evil force.
And it ends with a very cliffhangery, like,
**** moment at the end of book one.
So sets the stage for the rest of them.
Speaker A (49:08):
I love it.
I love it.
That sounds.
Looking forward to that.
It sounds so interesting.
Again,
it's just something I compliment you on.
You come up with these great ideas to keep sci
fi out there too, because that's a big thingtoo, you know, Sci fi has to stay out there
for you to survive.
And I know people argue Marvel Sci Fi.
(49:30):
Yeah, okay, I see what you're saying.
But before we wrap up here, what's onecharacter you would love to have a beer with?
These are in your books, by the way.
Or maybe go to dinner with?
Just pick their brain.
Speaker B (49:44):
Yeah, I love Pastor Rosie.
Pastor Rosie is my.
I believe it is John Grisham who has thecharacter named Denton Voyles.
And Denton Voyles travels between all of hisbooks.
First he's the D.A. then he's the AttorneyGeneral, then he's the head of the FBI.
And it's this name that.
That John Grisham likes to carry over into hisother novels.
(50:05):
For me, that's Pastor Rosie.
So Pastor Rosie Campion is a spiritual advisor
to virtually everybody in the saga inDissonance.
And she has appeared in Forecast.
She is a key player in the Phoenix experiment.
She is in the slide.
She is of sorts in the end.
And she will be in Talisman.
So really exciting to see all of that cometogether.
(50:26):
But man, I'd love.
She's very wise and very maternal and elderly.
And you just.
You love talking to a person like that.
That is so crowned with wisdom.
Where you're like, how do you see with such
clear eyes?You know?
And help everyone see who's.
Whose vision is murky.
I love people like that.
I'm impressed by them.
Speaker A (50:45):
Yeah. And then question to go along with that.
How about just from literary history.
What one character you love too?
Speaker B (50:53):
Gandalf. Absolutely. Gandalf.
I just want to touch his cloak.
I want to touch his cloak.
I want to touch his hair.
I want to hug him.
Speaker A (50:59):
Creepy.
Speaker B (51:01):
It's fine.
I would hold on to that cloak and I'd never
let go, baby.
I was like, can I please wear it?
Speaker A (51:06):
Can you let me have it?
Gandalf is always interesting to me justbecause maybe I remember the books and
everything like that.
But it always made me the only scene in that
whole trilogy where you kind.
Not to say that you didn't see other times,but where you saw his full power when he was
on taking out the bell rock.
(51:27):
It was a bell Rog, the demon.
I always threw that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And he's saying you.
You show not past and stuff.
And then you're like, ****, this.
This guy's for real.
You know.
And he did some with the Nausicule, you know,where he's shining that light and stuff like
that.
But I thought.
And some of the scenes where he's likefighting and everything.
(51:48):
I'm like, couldn't he just been like, zap,zap, zibbity zoo and be like destroyed?
I don't know.
You tell me.
Speaker B (51:54):
That's what I said.
That's what I was saying earlier is they just.
They humanized him too much.
I love in.
In the Lord of the Rings, Gandalf.
And they.
And the.
And the Fellowship are in the chamber ofMazarbul.
And they found balance or balance to Balin.
I can't believe I said it like that.
They found Balin's tomb.
That's shades of the 1978 Ralph Bakshi Lord of
(52:15):
the Rings creeping through.
They found Balin's tomb.
And now you know, here come.
Here comes a Balrog.
Here comes cave trolls and orcs and all that
stuff.
Gandalf goes and he puts the door, he closes
the door.
He says, run.
You know, everybody run.
Closes the door, he seals it with a spell.
And then he's holding the door and someone,
something grabs the handle of the door on theother side.
And he says, it perceived me in my spell.
(52:37):
I had to speak a word of command with a
capital C. I had to speak a word of command.
It nearly broke me,
but it was like I could read that sentenceover and over and over again.
That's Gandalf's power at work.
And they deprived him of that to some level in
the movies, which was kind of a bummer.
Speaker A (52:55):
Yeah, yeah.
And that's really.
That's really.
Yeah, that's really interesting to me.
And then I have one other question for you.
I'm guessing you're going to say this.
If you could live in any sci fi world,
any sci fi, where would it be?I'm guessing, what's it going to be?
But go ahead.
I thought you were gonna say Hobbit Shyer.
(53:16):
You know, it's like, come on.
Speaker B (53:18):
No, this is the world of 2026 to 2045.
Granted, three of them are set in 2042.
I just.
I would want to be in that world and I wouldwant to meet my characters.
I took a trip to Clarksville, Tennessee,
and Blue and Nashville and Blue Spring,Kentucky in Labor Day last year.
And I had not been there prior to writingDissonance, which is set there among other
(53:41):
locations.
I sculpted the story using, you know, Google
street view and aerial view and learning whereeverything goes.
But to be there, absolutely surreal.
Now, my characters, they do exist, okay.
And they're in my mind and they're in myheart.
So to be there and to know that this is whereI put them was absolutely like just.
It was such a. Straddling the line betweenreality and fantasy.
(54:04):
But it was so cool.
This is where it happened.
Oh, I loved it.
Speaker A (54:08):
Yeah. So people who are looking to get your books and everything before we.
You tell them where they can.
Speaker B (54:13):
It's a. It is an alien invasion saga.
Yes.
But it is a human survival story even more.
And the characters are full and the story isfull of thematic depth.
The aliens, the Gorgons, are fantasticallyterrifying.
They are deadly evil.
But is mankind even worse?
And you're going to love the characters.
You actually get to grow up with the
(54:36):
characters from, you know, as young as, youknow, two years old, all the way up to.
You've got 70 year olds.
But the young ones, you grow up with them in
the saga and you live with them and love withthem and learn with them.
Speaker A (54:48):
Just wrapping up here.
I've taken so much of your time.
I wish I could take more, but I understandwhat's coming up.
Where can they find you?
You know,
give them the spiel.
Speaker B (55:00):
Well, still working very hard at pitching the screenplay for Dissonance Volume
one Reality to major studios.
Yeah,
I've got the end adapted for.
For the screen as well.
And that's one entrance into several filmfestivals and won some awards.
Put me on IMDb.
Nice forecast.
The 911 novel has been adapted for the screen.
That's been entered into some film festivalsas well.
(55:22):
So that's awesome.
And still waiting to hear on all those.
Talisman is underway.
I'm about.
I'm a few days probably away from publishing abook called you're going straight to Helen in
a Handbasket.
And then.
And then the Talisman, you know, is, is what
I'll be working on after that, the other twoinstallments.
But they can always go to authoraronryan.comand subscribe to the blog or they can go to
author AaronRyan Group,
(55:44):
which takes them to my exclusive Facebookgroup where they'll find discount codes,
giveaways, news on the screenplays, news onappearances, blah, blah, blah.
And I'm always so grateful for the readershipand the support.
Speaker A (55:56):
Yes, absolutely.
And like I said before, I'll say it again,
please support Aaron and other independentauthors out there.
Do your best to, you know, go out there and,you know, get the books or just talk or just,
you know, just have interactions just like hispages and stuff, because that will move him up
(56:16):
into the algorithms and whatever the heckthey're doing to us nowadays to get him more
notoriety and give him more the prestige thatI think he needs and definitely deserve.
So thank you, Aaron.
Speaker B (56:29):
Thank you.
Speaker A (56:30):
Always amazing time.
Like I said, I wish I could have you on more
and I'll have you on again because I'm sureyou come up with another other book series
that will blow my mind and, and make me go,
yeah, this guy's pretty good.
Speaker B (56:42):
Thank you for having me back.
It's always a pleasure and I really appreciate
it, John.
Speaker A (56:46):
You betcha.
And again, you know, stay spooky, people.
We have Halloween coming up, so I know thisisn't Halloween, but still go back in, you
know, good sci fi book sometimes change thepace up, you know.
Speaker B (56:58):
Yeah. Hey, the Talisman, the first installment in Talisman, called Subterfuge, is
publishing on Halloween.
So there you go.
Speaker A (57:04):
All right.
All right.
Well,
I'LL make sure I have all the links in therewhen this episode comes out.
So you can go out there and visit his pageand, you know, ask him questions and just find
out, you know, what's coming up next.
So hopefully you can learn a little bit moreabout Aaron.
All right.
Thanks, Aaron.
It was great.
You have a good one, buddy.
Speaker B (57:25):
You, too.
Speaker A (57:26):
Bye.
Speaker B (57:26):
Bye.
Speaker A (57:33):
Sam.
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