Curtis C. Chen is joining us today to talk about his novel Kangaroo Too. Here’s the publisher’s description:
Set in the same world as Waypoint Kangaroo, Curtis C. Chen’s Kangaroo Too is bursting with adrenaline and intrigue in this unique outer space adventure.
On the way home from his latest mission, secret agent Kangaroo’s spacecraft is wrecked by a rogue mining robot. The agency tracks the bot back to the Moon, where a retired asteroid miner?code named “Clementine” ?might have information about who’s behind the sabotage.
Clementine will only deal with Jessica Chu, Kangaroo’s personal physician and a former military doctor once deployed in the asteroid belt. Kangaroo accompanies Jessica as a courier, smuggling Clementine’s payment of solid gold in the pocket universe that only he can use.
What should be a simple infiltration is hindered by the nearly one million tourists celebrating the anniversary of the first Moon landing. And before Kangaroo and Jessica can make contact, Lunar authorities arrest Jessica for the murder of a local worker.
Jessica won’t explain why she met the victim in secret or erased security footage that could exonerate her. To make things worse, a sudden terror attack puts the whole Moon under lockdown. Now Kangaroo alone has to get Clementine to talk, clear Jessica’s name, and stop a crooked scheme which threatens to ruin approximately one million vacations.
But old secrets are buried on the Moon, and digging up the past will make Kangaroo’s future very complicated…
What’s Curtis’s favorite bit?
CURTIS C. CHEN
My favorite bit in Kangaroo Too is the Planned Parenthood health center on the Moon.
(To forestall nitpickers: yes, I know Kangaroo calls it a “free clinic” in the book, but he’s speaking colloquially.)
At one point in the story, Kangaroo needs to meet with an extralegal contact, and the contact chooses a Planned Parenthood facility that he has after-hours access to through family connections. When I first plotted this out, it wasn’t important exactly what kind of location they met in, as long as it was private and unofficial. And I had a lot of leeway with the contact’s backstory.
I had thematic reasons specific to this story for choosing Planned Parenthood to be their meeting location, but I also had personal motivations. The future depicted in the Kangaroo-verse is not a dystopia; humans are still dealing with a lot of the problems we have today, plus a few new conundrums, but science and technology have continued to improve our lives. And I wanted that future to include Planned Parenthood.
As I’m writing this, Republicans in the US Congress are trying to roll back a lot of progressive government health care initiatives. Part of the latest proposed legislation would defund Planned Parenthood, which receives roughly $500 million in federal funding every year–more than half of its annual revenue. I hope that doesn’t happen, because we need Planned Parenthood.
Founded in 1916, Planned Parenthood provides health education, sexually transmitted infection (STI) testing and treatment, contraception, and, yes, abortions to people who may not have access to compassionate care elsewhere. Planned Parenthood health centers saw 2.4 million patients in 2015. I know people who received essential health services from Planned Parenthood when they were too poor or too scared to go anywhere else. I know people who are alive today because of Planned Parenthood. And a civilized society ought to provide for all its people, not just the most privileged.
Finally, for the record, this is not just about interrupting pregnancies. None of the federal funding that Planned Parenthood receives is used for abortion services. This is about providing reasonable access to reproductive health services for the half of the human race that, you know, actually makes the babies. And if you’re against that, well, I imagine we disagree on a great number of things, and I’ve got better things to do than argue with you. I’m working to bend the moral arc of the universe toward justice.
Back to the novel: once I had picked Planned Parenthood for the secret rendezvous, I revised an earlier scene in which Kangaroo gets pulled into a conversation at a hotel bar while following a target. The original draft of that talk was pretty inconsequential, both plot-wise and character-wise, but now that the topic of reproduction was on the table, I had an opportunity to raise the stakes in a few different ways.
The other barfly wants to talk about the difficulties of maintaining a long-distance relationship; how much is Kangaroo willing to reveal about his own personal life? The topic of children comes up; does Kangaroo want kids? What are his own–wait for it–plans for parenthood? You’ll have to read the book to find out. And I apologize for nothing.
LINKS:
This teen is the new face of Planned Parenthood. ‘I wanted all the chances everyone else had.’
Services like Planned Parenthood important as syphilis cases on the rise
Trump Wants to Slash All Federal Funding for Planned Parenthood
14 Things Everyone Gets Wrong About Abortion
Someone you love has had an abortion: It’s time to end the silence
BIO:
Once a Silicon Valley software engineer, Curtis C. Chen (陳致宇) now writes speculative fiction and runs puzzle games near Portland, Oregon. His debut novel Waypoint Kangaroo (a 2017 Locus Awards Finalist) is a science fiction thriller about a superpowered spy facing his toughest mission yet: vacation. The sequel, Kangaroo Too, lands the titular secret agent on the Moon to confront old secrets.
Curtis’ short stories have appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Mission: Tomorrow, and Oregon Reads Aloud. He is a graduate of the Clarion West and Viable Paradise writers’ workshops.
You can find Curtis at Puzzled Pint Portland on the second Tuesday of most every month. And yes, there is a puzzle hidden in each of the Kangaroo book covers! Finding the respective rabbit holes is left as an exercise for the reader.
Visit him online at: http://curtiscchen.com
