Josh Pearce returns to Analog with the story “Fast Women, Loose Lips, and Treasure Ships,” available in our [September/October issue, on sale now!]. In this our latest interview with Josh, we learn how lighthouses and the latest Top Gun movie helped inspire his most recent work.
Analog Editor: How did this story germinate? Was there a spark of inspiration, or did it come to you slowly?
Josh Pearce: In probably one of the strangest inspirations I’ve ever had, I got the idea for this story after watching Top Gun: Maverick. It was the early scene where Tom Cruise was flying the “Darkstar” (the fictional SR-72 descendant of the real-life SR-71 spy plane) so high and so fast that it was essentially a spacecraft. I saw that and thought, “Cool plane, I’ll write something about it.”
AE: What is the story behind this piece?
JP: Once I knew what I wanted to write about (spaceship!) I had to come up with a reason. The SR-71 Blackbird is amazing—it flew so high that, even if spotted, no other planes could climb high enough to intercept it. It also carried no armament. Its defense against any missiles fired at it was to simply go faster and outrun them. It still holds all kinds of crewed aircraft records.
However, I wanted an excuse to have a fast ship without it being military. So much science fiction set in space revolves around military or pseudo-military organizations, but I believe there’s more to space exploration and settlement than killing things, so I tried to think of alternatives: Couriers? Freighters? Scavengers and salvagers? These were hard to justify when robotic spacecraft could do it faster and cheaper.
I live relatively near the coast in California, and have an interest in lighthouses. On a visit to one, I learned about the U.S. Life-Saving Service, which maintained Life Saving Houses near treacherous waters. If the crew spotted a shipwreck, they’d push a lifeboat on these little railroad tracks down a ramp right into the ocean and then row out to save people, usually in the middle of a storm. And that was it, I had the framework for the story.
Once the ideas were there, I booked a cabin in the woods (actually it was a converted railroad caboose) and spent three days writing. And the payment from Analog almost exactly equaled the cost of the AirBnB, so it turned out to be a weekend well spent.
AE: Do you particularly relate to any of the characters in this story?
JP: I’m quite fond of both Thing 1 and Thing 2! Even though they’re meant to be interchangeable in the eyes of their employers, I think their individual personalities manage to break through. I like that one pilot flies search and rescue as an act of resistance, while the other one is just, “I want to go fast.” Pure intentions all around. I relate to having a terrible job that grinds you down and feeling like you gotta go fast to get out from under it. But also, sometimes, going fast doesn’t need a reason. How do you answer, “Why go fast?” That’s like asking, “Why rollercoasters?” or “Why motorcycles?” Whaddya mean, why?
Additionally, speed isn’t just an exhilaration. If you go fast enough, relativistic speeds, you change spacetime. The universe ahead of you blueshifts. Your entire body is transformed.
So much science fiction set in space revolves around military or pseudo-military organizations, but I believe there’s more to space exploration and settlement than killing things.
AE: How did the title for this piece come to you?
JP: I actually had this title sitting in a folder for a while. I was originally going to use it for a story about treasure hunters or salvagers but hadn’t figured out the worldbuilding, so I put it away and worked on other things. When I needed a title for this story, here was one that fit, and it actually steered the development of the story a little (I had to figure out what “loose lips” meant in the plot). The original seed was obviously playing with “loose lips sink ships” and double-entendre “fast women.” And “loose women” too, I suppose.
AE: Is this piece part of a greater universe of stories?
JP: Not intentionally, though I have been leaving room for my space opera/interstellar stories to be set in the same universe, mainly by restricting the level of technology. I’ve been doing less FTL travel and forcing human expansion to use sleeper ships or relativistic speed. This leaves a bunch of isolated, independently developing and differentiating societies for each story. I’d definitely like to do more stories about treasure ships, but then I’ll have to think of another clever title.
AE: What made you think of Analog for this story?
JP: This is about as close as I get to hard SF, and it fits into more of the classic science fiction tradition (rocket goes quickly from point A to point B) that the pulps were known for. A lot of my other stories are body horror or too weird to even count as science fiction so I’m glad I was able to rein it in enough to match with Analog.
AE: Are there any themes that you find yourself returning to throughout your writing? If yes, what and why?
JP: Corporations, monarchies, organized religion, military, and police are the villains, or where I draw villains from. If anyone tries to introduce an effort toward social equality, freedom, or justice in the real world, these institutions of authority are rarely found supporting such an effort, and are nearly always engaged in actively opposing it. They don’t want to see things change, because the way things are is good for them. But the suffering of millions of people or more is not going to end without something changing. When I write stories about characters trying to change their circumstances, it’s easy to see who has already cast themselves in the opposing role.
AE: What is the weirdest research rabbit-hole that working on a story has led you down?
JP: I once opened Wikipedia with the intention of learning more about the Crusades and several hours later came to the conclusion that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory had been founded by magic. I believe the rabbit-hole logic went Crusades > Knights Templar (or Knights Hospitaller) > various occult conspiracies about the Templars > Aleister Crowley > Jack Parsons (sidetrack to L. Ron Hubbard) > JPL.
Recently I was researching the Portuguese man o’ war and colony organisms made of zooids, which are individual animals with specialized functions: such as digestion (gastrozooids), hunting (dactylozooids), and reproduction (gonozooids). When it’s time to reproduce, the gonozooids detach from the colony and swim off into the depths to form a new colony (although no one has ever observed the full life cycle of a man o’ war).
Reminds me of those worms whose butts detach with their sex organs, grow new eyes, and crawl off on their own to find a mate. Something like that will be going into a future story.
AE: What are you reading right now?
JP: The World of Yesterday, which is Stefan Zweig’s memoir of the literary scene in pre-war Vienna before he fled Europe and killed himself. I originally discovered his writing through “Schachnovelle,” but if you’ve never heard of him, the blurb on the cover of this book says, “By the author who inspired Wes Anderson’s film The Grand Budapest Hotel.”
AE: How can our readers follow you and your writing? (IE: Social media handles, website URL…)
JP: I keep an up-to-date list of my publications on my site, fictionaljosh.com. Social media is a mess—you never know when one site will disappear and another will pop up, but I’m currently on Mastodon and Bluesky. You can find my latest contact info on my site.
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