Q&A with Jose M. Rodriguez, Author of Quantum Nightmares

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Book Description: Quantum Nightmares, a collection of dystopian sci-fi stories, contains the nuggets of bizarre psychological truth that help explain today’s divisive United States, where myth collides with belief and fact is hard to find.

Betty Gray, the infamous first woman to report an alien abduction, offers her eggs to save a future infertile human race. In doing so, she connects her consciousness to the entire stream of human history—past, present, and future. Her dreams frame each of the fifteen tales in the collection, forming the spine of

Quantum Nightmares.

From genderless societies to digital tribalism, each story explores the strange mechanics of power, identity, and survival in a world veering away from nature.

This debut collection channels the speculative precision of Clifford Simak, Phillip K Dick, and Ted Chiang, while dragging their serenity into darker, more chaotic realms.

Author Bio: Jose M. Rodriguez Jr. is a debut author of Puerto Rican descent, a veteran of the United States Military, a recovering drug addict, and a father. He lives in Iowa.

1. Can you share a bit about what inspired your decision to write Quantum Nightmares?    

QN took over two decades to write. I wrote my first story, The Puppet Master, at 16. It was a rudimentary draft of what later developed into Vicarious Intruders. It was a lot of fun writing that one, as I took several liberties and created a world boundless and surreal. In that way, writing, like painting or traditional art, is a fantastic outlet. A blank canvas has infinite possibilities, and just the same, an empty page with that blinking single line is boundless, and that’s what really intrigued me about writing. Creating something out of nothing. In me, a fire burned, and that intrigue kept me typing until I had enough for a collection.     

2. The collection is unique and artistic in the scenes it paints. Were there any books, films, or art that inspired Quantum Nightmares? 
   

The LSD trip scene in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson, has always stayed with me and for good reason. I pay homage to Thompson in a similar scene in Vicarious Intruders, where the antagonist unwittingly administers LSD via eyedrops to alleviate chemical burns in a sadistic and admittedly over-the-top trauma-based disassociation technique mastered by developers of MK ULTRA, which the CIA purportedly used to create Manchurian candidates. Philip K. Dick was also a tremendous influence. His prolific career speaks for itself, and his stories have always stuck out to me as legendary. RPCD is a mix between The Adjustment Bureau and Minority Report. And Forgive me Father, for I Have Sinned has echoes of Total Recall. I’m also an avid reader of Stephen King; his boldness and imagination are without parallel. And I could never field a question of inspiration without acknowledging a few anthology shows that perfectly encapsulate what a short story should be: Tales from the Crypt, Are You Afraid of the Dark, Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and most recently Black Mirror are all gems and full of terrifyingly creative concepts for anyone looking for inspiration into the macabre. I wrote Five Hives with audacious dreams of one day seeing it as a chapter in a future season of Black Mirrors. But the horrors of technology are an immersive theme in QN, and I think Black Mirror could field a whole season using a handful of my stories.            

3. Did you write the stories in the order they appear, or were they written out of sequence and later organized into this order?

As I said earlier, it took me over 20 years to write QN. Many of the stories were conceived as a teenager and haphazardly attempted with good intention but ill execution, as I had yet to develop the skill set. By the time I joined the Army in 2008 at the age of 23, I had 6 or 7 paper copies of stories that I protected like coveted treasure. They stayed tucked away in a small water/fireproof safe along with my birth certificate, passport, and social security number. They traveled with me to Germany, Afghanistan, and then back home. Every so often, when inspiration struck, I’d dust the pages off, edit them, and reprint the new versions. It wasn’t until 2022 when I began my correspondence with Jessica Powers that I decided to get off the proverbial toilet and put everything I had into writing, and after several years of meticulous and sometimes heartbreaking edits, QN was slowly birthed. She held my hand and was instrumental in the sequence order decision.

4. The stories are very graphic and hard-hitting. Did you have any reservations about writing something that some may interpret as offensive?

Very much so. The last thing I want to do is offend anyone. I even considered issuing a disclaimer in the pretext to avoid such events. But in the end was convinced otherwise. Ultimately, and this is true for any artist, people are going to love your work or hate it. There is no avoiding that. The only thing one can do is put their best foot forward and hope the right people pick it up. Unfortunately, reading is a dying art. Even more unfortunately, I think QN is tailored more towards a demographic that doesn’t read, a demographic that would find it highly entertaining and equally important if ever they got over their aversion towards reading anything without pictures. I may be presumptuous and even a little judgmental when I say the people who regularly read, the quote, unquote “more educated people of society” will be highly offended by some of the stories. And I was torn when deciding whether I should include said stories. I confided in Jessica Powers my reservations, and she suggested reading, On Writing by Stephen King, which can be summed up with— “Don’t say reproductive organ when you mean dick.” But I truly hope it doesn’t offend anyone to the point of being considered vulgar, because that wasn’t my intention. Every story has a valuable lesson if one is open enough to look. There was a question of being sued by whoever owns the rights to Baby Shark as well, but lawyers confirmed it was in the public domain.

5. Can you discuss your approach to blending history with fiction? What guided your decision to interweave science fiction with reality, and how did you navigate that process?

I’m a history nerd by nature. But history, as we know it, and indeed all scholarly disciplines, are slow-moving cogs. It takes years of peer-reviewed studies to vet and change established theories. For example, even though we know Columbus wasn’t the first to America, it’s still what they teach in middle school American history. It almost feels like a deliberate dragging of the feet. And the time lag is doubly true for any archeological discoveries that deal with time periods that are pre-humanity. Everything from giant bones collecting dust in Smithsonian basements to 200-million-year-old hammers displayed as an afterthought in a small, obscure museum in Malta or ancient lost texts hiding in the Vatican. The gatekeepers of knowledge, the ones that were supposed to disseminate unbiased facts, mostly suppress anything that doesn’t fit their neatly packaged models. The older I get and the more I delve into the etymology of things, the more I realize how much of our history is omitted, twisted, or outright fabricated. Historians are the ultimate storytellers. I figure if they can do it, so can I.

6. You use a variety of styles in your writing—interview formats, traditional narrative, multiple perspectives, and more. Can you explain your choice to employ these different styles and what effect you think the shifts have on the collection?

I borrowed the interview format for Five Hives from Ted Chiang. In his book, Stories of Your Life and Others, he wrote a story called, Liking What You See: A Documentary; a brilliant gem about an implanted device that made everyone that the wearer looked at attractive. The interviewer went around asking historians, sociologists, and the average person about their experiences, and I thought it was incredibly authentic. As for variety, I decided to throw in a few satire stories as garnish to counterbalance the bleak aftertaste of dead babies and cannibalism. The YouTube skit was so outlandish and fun to write, and the spoof about the Council of Nicaea creating beer pong. That was one of the ones I considered omitting because I didn’t want to offend anyone. I even went as far as to have two priests and one pastor read it to ensure I wasn’t being too disrespectful. They all agreed it was well within the bounds of respect if the reader interprets the message correctly.

7. I noticed the stories share connections—for example, the “Lullaby” appears in both Five Hives and Forgive Me, Father, I Have Sinned. Can you talk about your process for writing short stories set in the same universe and incorporating crossover elements?

That’s actually the only incidence of which a crossover occurs. And only the savviest reader will even notice the connection. That happened by chance as I was fishing for a name for the character of the dead cellmate and picked out of a hat the same name as a character in Five Hives, so I decided to use the same guy. I’m happy with how it played out.

8. The story concludes in the epilogue in a way that surprises readers yet makes sense upon a full reading. Did you plan this ending from the start, or did it emerge as you wrote the stories?

The idea kind of fell into my lap with a bow tied to it. I didn’t even know if I was going to write an epilogue, but using The Illustrated Man as a template, I knew I had to. Ultimately, I decided to connect the Prologue concept of Betty Hill being like Eve—the first woman, whose original sin thrust humanity into a cursed life—as the premise for the Epilogue. It’s an absurd accusation, and I apologize to the Hill family, but it flows perfectly with the storyline.

9.  Were there any surprises or unexpected discoveries during your writing process?

I discovered the reason most people avoid writing. It’s a grueling, lengthy process; often compared to carrying a baby to term. Not in the physical sense. Obviously. There were several times I wanted to quit, but Jessica always knew what to say or how to handle my misgivings. This book (and the next one) doesn’t get done without her invaluable guidance.

10. Did you encounter any challenges while writing?
    

I didn’t like that there was nothing connecting them. Originally, each story was going to stand alone, and it was going to be called The Vault, a tribute to the length of time it took to piece together. But I hit a roadblock (one of many), and my brilliant editor Jessica suggested I put the writing hat down; take a break to read stories penned by the juggernauts in my field: Bradbury, Poe, Simak, etc. Of course, as a beginning writer eager to get my first book in print and make my name in the industry, the last thing you want to hear is to stop writing and read for a month. I begrudgingly obeyed and, in the process, read The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury. A great piece of short story fiction. The stories are connected by the prologue: The Illustrated Man, who’s a runaway carnie with malleable tattoos that morph and change, and each story is an illustration. At the time, The Greys wasn’t formatted to be the spine that connects every story. That changed after reading The Illustrated Man.

11. Can you talk about the drawings included in the epilogue? Did you create them yourself, and if so, what was your process for developing these illustrations?

The drawings are the actual drawings of Betty and Barny Hill. They are taken out of the reports they made with the hypnotist.

12. Besides being incredibly entertaining, this novel offers important commentary on politics and the state of the world. What key takeaways do you hope readers gain from your collection?

The concept of evil vs. light is a constant theme in many of the stories, and in many of the stories, evil triumphs over the light. That theme culminates as themes typically do in the last actual story, Legion; a story that posits the cyclical nature of humanity—the rise and fall of civilization reported not by scholars but by every ancient civilization on the planet—is directly correlated with humanity's inability to defeat their demons and ascend to the next level of consciousness. In the story, there’s an ascended master assigned to each iteration or epoch, and their powers falter as humanity is unable to ascend, slowly breaking the ascended master’s heart, which supernovas (the dying heart) upon the master’s death and the waves of energy rain down hellfire upon the earth, ending that civilization in cataclysm and starting the next cycle anew. This is my favorite story because I think it says so much about where we are as a species. And I do truly feel it is the way of the world and that we are at a crossroads, and our actions of the immediate future will ultimately decide whether we ascend or get reset. So, the key takeaway I hope readers gain from the collection is don’t fuck it up. That, and Nair is used for hair removal only.