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scalziwhatever_feed) wrote2025-08-12 03:19 pm
The Big Idea: Tim Chawaga
Life should be a party. Author Tim Chawaga is here today to expand upon this idea, showing us that parties can come in many forms. Follow along in the Big Idea for his newest novel, Salvagia, to see just how much can be worth celebrating.
TIM CHAWAGA:
When I was in college I was briefly obsessed with something called the Emergency Party Button.
It’s exactly what it sounds like: a metal box with a big red button on a coffee table in a sparse living room not too different from the sort of white-walled, “IKEA-showroom-post-hurricane” spaces that I would occupy for most of my 20s. When the button is pressed, there is a brief hesitation, and then the blinds close, the lamps dim and change colors, What is Love blasts at a voice-drowning volume. Laser lights, strobe lights and fog machine all activate in succession. You can imagine a party being there but of course there isn’t one… just a lone genius standing behind his phone, panning the camera around the empty room for three whole minutes. I was dumbstruck by their ingenuity. I also wondered how many party emergencies such a person could possibly have.
I was a theater major, and this was exactly the kind of theater that I loved—immersive, experimental, unexpected, delightful. I was also in college, and decided that the EPB was essential for the two-bedroom apartment I shared with five other people.
So I tried to build one myself. Despite a technical page with detail approaching the Unabomber journal, I failed. Today, after decades of technological advancement, personal technical experience and a net worth consistently above zero, I feel I am no closer. If anything, my time in tech (particularly in IT) has taught me that anything so bespoke, with so many moving parts (especially IoT parts from different brands with different, proprietary operating systems), will simply create more problems than they could ever hope to solve. The internet is now awash with EPBs, but I have lost faith that behind these social media blips of seamless button/party bliss is anything other than days of labor, thousands of dollars in materials and installment, and the same three minutes of solitary camera panning. A Potemkin party.
The Big Idea at the root of my novel, Salvagia, (and, now that I think about it, much of my writing in general) is this: the power of the individual to build a true Emergency Party Button is a basic human right that we (read: I) have been denied, and will continue to be denied for at least another century, until our anger ossifies, and we pursue drastic action.
On the surface, Salvagia is a sci-fi mystery with all the trappings of both genres: dead bodies, mechanical alligators, a drag race to space (just to name a few).
My protagonist, Triss Mackey, was raised by a class of nomads descended from today’s “right-to-repair” movement, who roam the country “liberating” tech and IP from feds and corporations. She’s currently stuck in a dead-end government job pulling up air conditioners from a part of the flooded South Florida coast known as the “yoreshore”, the area between where the shore used to be and where it is now.
The feds are about to abandon Florida and deregulate the coast. The yoreshore is on the cusp of a real estate boom, and all sorts of groups are about to come in and build it up again. Most of them are the familiar types, the ones responsible for ruining the coast in the first place—developers and corporate mafias, with shady crypto cults funding it all.
But there are a couple of people who don’t work for anybody, who are just looking for a quiet little spot to dream up a new, sustainable way of living.
Building in the yoreshore, in other words, is their Emergency Party Button.
Because the power to build a true Emergency Party Button, to walk through the world and instantly partify the air around them, is the same as the power to build a filter to clean water from any source, or to generate enough energy to sustain oneself with a surplus for the community. It’s self-sufficiency, created from a subjective place of joy, in service of that all-American pursuit of happiness.
And we should be creating more examples of joyful technology in science fiction. We should depict the ways in which technology can expand our freedoms, bring us closer together and enhance what makes us human, like any good party does.
In the world of Salvagia, just like today, technology is largely controlled by the distant and powerful, to exploit and control. Those who want to build a better way are willing to hide, fight, and steal the means to do so.
A true Emergency Party Button is the radical future we deserve, the future we were promised. It is essential to believe this now, to envision the kinds of parties we could be having, to build the fighting spirit required to seize them.
Salvagia: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
Welcome back to Whatcha Reading! Here’s how we’re kicking off August:
Normally I wouldn’t buy a big tub of miso, but I decided to make Half Baked Harvest’s 
We’re back!
This Rec League was sent in by Anne: