The Present Future: Lincoln Michel on Building The Body Scout
There’s nothing more American than baseball, the healthcare crisis, and gawking at high profile murders—unless you find a way to make money off all three. In an adrenaline-pumped New York City that’s at once futuristic and familiar, Lincoln Michel’s debut dystopian novel The Body Scout follows medical-debt-ridden Kobo as he tries to solve the murder of his brother, the star player on the Monsanto Mets baseball team. While extending current crises of healthcare, technology, and climate change 50 years into the future, Michel’s world operates on the premise that rather than disappearing into extinction, we’re going to have to live with the consequences of our society’s present choices.
I called Lincoln Michel in New York just before an unseasonal snow hit to talk about world building and how to play with the future. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Amanda Pampuro: Let’s talk about world building. How did you take the familiar city of New York and transform it into this grotesque future overrun by capitalism for the novel?
Lincoln Michel: Framed that way, it makes it sound like I wrote a straight depiction of the city—New York is already overrun by capitalism and pretty grotesque in certain ways.
I approached the world building in what I would call an expressionistic way. I was more concerned about creating the kind of atmosphere and dramatic resonances and exploring the ideas that I was interested in, rather than a stricter, more logical kind of world building. Part of that, of course, is that the novel is satirical; a lot of what I did was simply hyperbolize what’s already in the real world, real New-York-City things.
For example, there’s a thing in the novel where Kobo and his brother live in these subterranean apartments that are subsidized by the government to be affordable housing. In the New York City of our world, there has been this thing where there are buildings that have both luxury apartments and affordable housing. But they get separate entrances that are called “the corridors” so that the rich people who own the apartments don’t have to walk through the same door as people that are getting more affordable housing.
AP: You’re playing with the future, creating this very interesting world and could have set the story anywhere, so why New York?
LM: I grew up in Virginia, but I’ve been in New York since 2006, so it was really just a natural setting for me. That said, I do think it fits pretty neatly into the kinds of themes and elements I was building the story around—for example, establishing a noir vibe, which I think New York is a good city for. There’s exploration of climate change in the book, and New York is certainly a city that would, I think, still exist, but would obviously have major problems with rising sea levels. And then there’s an element of baseball to the book and New York is still a baseball city too.
AP: Several reviewers, and even the book jacket, home in on The Body Scout’s genre bending. The art of pulling from different literary toolboxes is almost a signature of living in this postmodern era, but you do it so artfully, blending the noir framework with the socially conscious dystopian narrative. How did you decide what to pull from where when crafting different story arcs?
LM: That’s very true, we’re in this genre-bending age. I also feel like we’ve moved to a slightly different phase in which a lot of writers of my generation are not approaching things so much as genre bending for the sake of using genre just as material to create other things but are very invested in genre. Like, we’re genre omnivores. I feel like so many of my fellow writers these days want to write a horror novel one day, and then a science fiction novel the next, but are very seriously invested in those genres themselves, not just as material to subvert.
I thought of the world building elements in the book as the constraints in which I could generate the other elements of the story. I mean constraints in the French oulipo way of constraints that are a positive thing, that allow you to generate new ideas, and—paradoxically—give yourself more freedom as a writer. I remember when I started the book I didn’t have a title, just a kind of vague idea. And I wrote at the top of my document: science fiction, baseball, body-horror-noir novel, or something along those lines. Then I had these elements. I had this cyberpunk novel focused on body modification, the noir voice, a baseball setting. I wanted some body horror elements too, and I looked for things that hit all of those points, almost like drawing a big Venn diagram and seeing what would be in the middle.
Maybe an obvious example of that is the main character, Kobo, a down-on-his-luck baseball scout with a janky cybernetic arm who scouts for a future baseball league run by biotech and pharmaceutical companies. That was how it was working for me, figuring out what was what and what I could hit with all these different points that allowed me to generate new ideas for the story.
AP: Why was it important for you to focus on the way technology interacts with the body?
LM: On a science-fiction level, I think that biotechnology and drugs and advanced pharmaceuticals and advanced cybernetics, and all of this kind of stuff coming down the pipeline feels like the next big area of scientific expansion and technological progress. Whether it’s progress in a good way or bad way is a different question, but we’re starting to learn how to genetically edit with CRISPR, so I felt like that is an area that’s going to be major in the future, and also an area that’s somewhat underserved by a lot of science fiction out there.
On another level, I find the internet and virtual reality increasingly boring. I’m someone who’s very online; I’m on Twitter every day. I’m plugged into this stuff. I’m not in any way a kind of Luddite who doesn’t care about it, but I when I see ads for the Metaverse, it’s like Playmobil figures in an office drawing on a chalkboard. It feels like a dystopia, but a boring one.
AP: You’ve spent a good part of your career writing short stories. Did you feel an easy transition from writing shorts to longer works, or did it feel like learning how to write all over again?
LM: Like a lot of writers who started out writing short stories, I certainly had to teach myself how to write a novel, and it was a halting and awkward process. To a degree, I certainly wrote the starts of other novels, I completed one novel entirely, all before I dove into writing The Body Scout.
Process-wise, the difference for me was mainly that I had to outline a lot. I never really outline when I write short stories, and I didn’t outline at first; I wrote maybe 50,000 words just playing around with the characters and the world. But at some point, I found it very useful for myself to create an outline, and part of that is not just the novel itself, but that this one specifically has a noir plot, so it’s pretty plot-heavy. As someone who comes from a more “literary fiction” background, I definitely had to teach myself plot from scratch, more or less. Part of that was really trying to map out the plot piece for myself.
AP: The way The Body Scout hits on the affordability of healthcare and the market blurring the line between what is necessary and what is elective all felt really eerie when reading the book in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. What was your experience working on this book during that crisis?
LM: It was certainly surreal, and maybe appropriately surreal and dystopian. I got the idea for this book many, many years ago. I started writing it in earnest in 2015 and 2016, wrote the bulk of it in 2017, revised it all, and then submitted it to editors in February 2020 right before COVID hit. So everything in the book about pandemics and healthcare inequality and corporations getting rich off advanced medical treatments came before COVID. So it was prescient in a way.
When it came out, I was kind of worried people wouldn’t want to read a healthcare dystopian novel in the middle of a pandemic. Of course, more than any of that, I was mostly worried about the state of the world and everyone getting sick and dying.
It was strange walking through the New York City streets that are usually so completely filled with people but are now completely empty—I feel like we all lived through so much. Here we had the George Floyd protests which I certainly took part in, and we had all these different levels of COVID restrictions and fear and openings and changes. It was a whole lot.
AP: Within that framework, there are so many other issues to unpack, even just the dynamics of ableism in the book alongside disproportionate access to healthcare—how did you approach that issue?
LM: Something I sometimes have a problem with in science fiction is this approach in which technology is universally implemented, either in a utopian or dystopian way, like everything works or everything’s horrible. I wanted to create a nuanced picture of a future where different groups and individuals react differently to new technologies, with different ideologies and reactions playing out on the page. Certainly a lot of that has to do with the physical body and questions surrounding how we approach changing our bodies with different technologies, but I didn’t want that to be a universal thing, like everyone’s doing X. Instead I wanted to leave ground for different reactions, which I think is how technology tends to play out in the real world.
AP: The Body Scout taps into all kinds of current fears: sports doping, affordable healthcare, climate change, building codes, the pressure to keep up—it takes these fears and extends them into the future like cans kicked down the road. My favorite part is when Kobo tells Deloris that when they were kids they expected the world to end, but it kept going. I see this as a kind of disappointed optimism. Is this representative of the present you’re writing in, or do you think it’s a fair warning for the future?
LM: I don’t think science fiction is about making predictions. From my view, it’s reflecting our own reality back to us through this lens of the future. So I think the book is more about my feelings of the present, broadly speaking, than what I predict the future to be. It’s extrapolating from current trends. So here in America, if we just continue down the paths we’re on, if inequality keeps widening, and ideological fractions and disinformation keep expanding, if corporate power keeps consolidating, if we keep fracturing lies, so on and so forth—that was the vibe I was going for.
“Disappointed optimism” might be a really accurate description of my mindset though. I don’t know if I have the most hope about the future, but I definitely believe hope is an essential human quality, and that the future is very uncertain, and we have to fight to make it what we want to be. Giving up really only helps the powerful and the forces that are making things worse and worse.
Lincoln Michel's debut novel The Body Scout (Orbit) was named one of the ten best SFF books of 2021 by The New York Times. He is also the author of the story collection Upright Beasts (Coffee House Press) and the co-editor of the anthologies Tiny Crimes (Catapult) and Tiny Nightmares (Catapult). His fiction appears in The Paris Review, Granta, NOON, Lightspeed, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and elsewhere. You can find him online at lincolnmichel.com and @thelincoln.
Amanda Pampuro cut her teeth reporting for the Marianas Variety in Guam and now covers a Colorado court beat. Her fiction has appeared in The Write Launch, crag, Menacing Hedge, The Cabinet of Heed, and Workers Write! She has been listed as a finalist twice for the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest and received a grant from National Geographic to report on the COVID-19 pandemic in Mexico. Her novella Wish List (Alien Buddha Press) was published in April. Follow her heart @Bright_Lamp.