The Big Idea: Tim Pratt

There’s the safe way to write a novel, and then there’s Tim Pratt’s way to write a novel. Abandoning any worries of appealing to the masses, Pratt hit the gas on all of their most interesting ideas and crafted the newest addition to their Nigh-Space series, The Jewel and the Comet. TIM PRATT: I mean, if I’m being honest, the actual Big Idea in The Jewel and the Comet (and the Nigh-Space series in general) is “total self-indulgence.” Some years ago, I took psychedelics and got on the phone with a writer friend of mine and rambled to her for a while about all the things I’d put in one book if I was completely unconcerned with marketability: multiverse stuff, space operatics, that sense of dislocation you get in good contemporary fantasy when the impossible and the mundane are immediately juxtaposed, gender shit, talking spaceships, a kinky romance as a sneaky way to talk about communication in relationships, a big guy/little guy amoral villain duo, and more big tropey power chords than…