“I’m an accidental Amish Sci-Fi writer.”
I said this during an NPR interview after my book Pennsylvania became the #1 selling Science Fiction book on all of Amazon. Things were kind of blowing up for me and I was getting constant requests for interviews. I was also getting requests from Hollywood to buy options on my books… but that’s a story for later in the article.
Anyway, so “I’m an accidental Amish Sci-Fi writer” I told the NPR radio guy.
That got a good laugh out of my interviewer. “Explain that!” he said.
Here’s the story.
I never intended to be an author. I never intended to be a fiction author. A double-super-extra never intended to ever write anything that would be considered “sci-fi.”
I was always a writer. I just wrote things and never really categorized them or put them in genres in my head. When I met my wife 30+ years ago, I was writing a novel. I never attempted to publish it. I just wanted to know if I could do it. That novel was basically The Matrix way before anyone had come up with The Matrix. I had no concept of what genre it was… or even cared. It was philosophical and not really about what the story was about. It was an intellectual exercise.
As a Christian, I was making a commentary about pseudo-science, wild theories accepted as fact, and the natural result of bad ideas.
The basic gist of the story was that the “old gods” were just humans who had evolved past the need to have bodies. They became disembodied spirits – and after millennia passed, some of them realized they missed having bodies. (This is the overall story of the book, but it wasn’t overtly in the text until it was revealed at the end.) Some of the spirits began a project to begin evolution over again with the idea that they would eventually reproduce mankind, which they did. Some of the other spirits thought this was a bad idea, so they encoded into the genetics a blueprint that would eventually produce some hunters who would stop it from happening by destroying mankind. It was sciency, and it was fiction. I never considered it science fiction. What did I know?
I was just a kid. It was a stupid book and poorly written. But it was WAY before its time. But I was just proving to myself I could write a book.
About ten years later, I started writing articles and columns on a blog. We were living on a five-acre farm and were learning all the skills that would eventually lead us to start a bigger farm off-grid. I was just writing about all the things I was learning as we moved off-grid. Another nearly ten years later, and we were actually living off-grid and I was still writing about it.
I began uploading “chapters” of what I was writing systematically onto my blog. (This was before social media.) It was a book, and people were reading it as a book, but I never thought of it as a book.
I lived off-grid, and our farm was completely off-grid, but I had a small solar power system down at my office by the creek that would charge my laptop. We would get a motel room sometimes so I could write and use their Wi-Fi to upload my writing to my blog. Eventually, we were able to get Wi-Fi down at my little office and power it with my tiny 300-watt solar power system. A lot of times I was just uploading things using a cell phone.
This was my first contact with people who were so ignorant about what “off-grid” means that they insisted that if I was using Facebook and had a blog, I really couldn’t be off-grid. Off-grid simply means that you are not connected to the mainstream electrical and utility grid. On our household and farm, we used no electricity at all, except for a few battery-powered hand tools we would charge with my limited solar power. Or, sometimes when we rented a motel room for me to write, we would charge batteries.
Back to the story… I was releasing “chapters” for free online. A big and very popular off-grid blog in the UK contacted me and asked me if they could release the “book” chapter by chapter on their blog, giving me credit. So, my “book” was taking off pretty fast.
People started emailing me and saying, “You should really release this as a book!” “We want this in print format!” “We need this book as a resource!” I knew a man who was really into producing web content, so I asked him about it and he told me about Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing. There was also a way to use Amazon to publish the book in print that people could order online or from brick-and-mortar bookstores. We studied it and once I heard about KDP I never even considered getting the book mainstream published. I had no patience for dealing with a middle-man, and I already had an audience, and I knew absolutely NOTHING about publishing. So we put the book up on Amazon and announced a launch date. This was in early 2011.
Well, lo and behold the book went all the way to #29 on all of Amazon! Not in some sub-category like BOOKS>HOW TO>OFF-GRID… but ALL of Amazon. It was officially the number #29 selling book in the biggest bookstore in the world. It didn’t get onto the NYTimes or the USA Today lists for two reasons… those lists are “gamed” by traditional publishers, and they have rules about how your books can sell which effectively made it impossible for this book to make any bestselling list. I didn’t care because we were selling a ton of books, and I was making money at it AND helping people.
I got a call from a guy who worked as an agent for these kinds of books, and he said, “I can get you a traditional publishing contract, no problem. Probably there will be a $5,000 advance and a standard deal. I can send you a contract.” I just shook my head. Why would I accept that deal? “I made that much yesterday,” I told the agent, and that was that.
(A few years later I told this story during the aforementioned interview on NPR. The actual interview took two hours, but the snippets they aired (out of context) took up about 4 minutes. In the released interview, they made it sound like I made that much every day. Believe me, I didn’t. It just happened to be the day after the book got a bunch of promotion and press and I was making a point, anyway.)
Anyway, I was now a published author – with not only an e-book, but a paperback and hardback book I could hold in my hands. The problem was that most people could not conceive of a world without electricity or all the modern conveniences. I was inundated with emails from readers who found the book and the philosophy valuable and interesting, but they could not picture or conceive of any situation where anyone might need or have to learn to live without grid utilities. They couldn’t even imagine a disaster that might require a limited time living off the grid. So… I decided to write another book. This time I would write a fiction book, but still be teaching the same ideas.
I released my first fiction book The Last Pilgrims a year later in 2012. It was a fantastic story, even if the writing wasn’t stellar. I wrote it for my children, and as a display of how people might have to live someday. It was a commentary on the technocracy that was ruining the world.
The Last Pilgrims was just a post-apocalyptic story of people living around here in Central Texas 25 years after a major systemic disaster destroys modern society. The tagline of the book was “25 years in the future is 500 years in the past.”
The book sold very well, but now I had another problem. In the book The Last Pilgrims, I don’t ever define what the “disaster” was that destroyed the world and killed 90% of the population of America. I didn’t think it was important. The book just tells the story of some “plain people” (think Amish) living in a post-apocalyptic world after an unnamed disaster.
My new problem was that EVERYONE wanted to know… WHAT HAPPENED? Why was the world like that?
So, next, I teamed up with a good friend, a high school friend named Chris Awalt, and we wrote an absolutely epic prequel apocalyptic disaster series entitled WICK. We combined all four novelettes of the WICK saga into a single 800-page book and released that and it sold well. This was around 2013.
This gets me to the point where I started this story… I was writing things to respond to what people wanted and what they wanted to know. I never had any intent. I had no game plan. Another thing I didn’t know… Amazon and every other bookstore categorizes “apocalyptic” and “post-apocalyptic” literature as science fiction. Even if there are not really any futuristic science elements in the story. To me that was crazy. There was absolutely nothing science fiction about my writing. Crazy.
And it gets crazier… I was living off-grid at the time. We grew our own food and made our clothes. We were milking cows and raising sheep and harvesting wheat by hand. A documentary was in the works about our lifestyle. I was being contacted by reality TV companies. They shot a pilot sizzle reel to sell our story to the cable networks. To the world… I was Amish. (We were not Amish, we just lived like it. Mostly.)
So, to the world I was Amish. To the publishing industry, I was a science fiction writer. I was neither.
People were writing me and emailing me and calling me a “Sci-fi author.”
Ok, I know this is long. I’m gonna try to speed this up. I was writing, making good money, and having fun. An author community had sprung up of indie authors, and I became part of it. The NPR interview was about indie publishing, and I was called one of the success stories of self-publishing. I’d met another very successful indie author named Hugh Howey. His bestselling series WOOL has now become a TV show on Apple+ called SILO. Anyway, Hugh started calling me an “Amish Sci-Fi writer.” I told him I was uncomfortable with being categorized as both “Amish” (which I wasn’t) and “Scifi” (which I wasn’t.) He told me to get over it, and lean into it. He said, “sit down and write an Amish Sci-Fi short story. Just a little tidbit. Upload it to Amazon and see how it does.”
I wrote a little short story about an 18-year-old Amish boy who signed up for an emigration plan to colonize a new planet called New Pennsylvania. The authorities were recruiting the Amish to colonize the planet so they would have agriculture to feed the people. The Amish kid ends up in the middle of a very sci-fi civil war. Anyway, it was a short story and ended in a cliffhanger.
From that moment, things went nuclear. The demand for the rest of the story went through the roof. I wrote out 4 more parts and then combined them into a novel entitled PENNSYLVANIA.
The experts told me no one would ever read Amish Sci-Fi, since it didn’t exist. They told me no one would read a novel named after a state. They told me that if you didn’t have a mainstream publisher, it was just a vanity story and, again, no one would read it.
Pennsylvania became a runaway bestseller, and the novel version went all the way up to #19 on Amazon. Not #19 in all of science fiction. It was #1 in all of science fiction. It went to #19 on ALL of Amazon.
A month or so later, I got a message from a Hollywood producer… would I sell a film option to make a movie out of Pennsylvania? So, I did. We nabbed one of the best Production Designers in the world – a man who is sci-fi movie royalty – as the director. He is responsible for creating some imagery you will know and never forget. Like the alien on Independence Day and the robots in iRobot, and the “gate” in Stargate. Anyway, this was a very big deal.
Now, the movie project has hit a bunch of bumps and roadblocks in seven or eight years. We were close to going into pre-production with a $40 million dollar budget in March of 2020… when Covid hit. The recent writers’ strike was another setback.
I receive hope by considering that Hugh Howey’s book WOOL took 12 years to make it to the screen. Francis Ford Coppola’s upcoming sci-fi film Megalopolis is 40 years in the making. I think the Lord of the Rings took a few decades. So, I haven’t lost hope. It could happen.
Anyway kids, that’s the story of the Accidental Amish Sci-Fi writer who walks among you!
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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear on Wednesdays and Sundays on the website.