French author Sam Lacoste talks cyberpunk, grimdark, Those Eyes, and why a futuristic genre can’t spend forever looking backward.
Cyberpunk has spent decades imagining the future. For French author Sam Lacoste, that creates a problem when the genre becomes too attached to its own past.
“We love cyberpunk so much that we want it to advance,” he says. “If it is a futuristic genre, you have to go forward, not backward.”
That idea sits near the center of Lacoste’s fiction, which draws from science fiction, cyberpunk, grimdark, comics, games, and film while looking beyond some of the familiar divisions between rebels and corporations, heroes and systems.
We originally spoke with Lacoste earlier in the development of Monsters, his larger fiction project, as shorter works such as Those Eyes were beginning to reveal pieces of its world. With Monsters now much further along, we’re revisiting that conversation as a snapshot of where the project began and the ideas already shaping it.
You’re a French author working heavily in science fiction. Where did that interest begin?
I was born and raised in Paris, and I love science fiction. I’m a science-fiction nerd, but really a nerd for pop culture in general: cinema, video games, literature, comics, French comics. I was exposed to a lot of it very young. My grandmother was a French teacher, and my father sold newspapers, magazines, and comics during the 1990s. I had access to comics and magazines like Heavy Metal. That opened my eyes and broadened my horizons. My grandmother also gave me a taste for fiction through literature.
Cyberpunk is how we originally connected. What interests you about the genre?
We love cyberpunk so much that we want it to advance. I don’t want it to stagnate. Cyberpunk is very popular, but it is a genre born in the 1980s that still often responds to the colors and ideas of the 1980s.
But cyberpunk was a futuristic genre. If it is a futuristic genre, you have to go forward, not backward.
That’s what I’m trying to do. I don’t know if I’ll succeed, but I’ll put all my strength into imagining what cyberpunk could be today.
That’s a difficult task.
What do you think cyberpunk still has room to explore?
The setting and the complexity inside it. Cyberpunk can sometimes be presented very directly: rebellion on one side, corporations and the established order on the other. But we’ve already told many stories about rebellion and winning against the established order.
There is more nuance than simply saying there is a rebel side and a bad corporate side. They are interconnected. The stories that interest me explore that relationship and the systems people already live inside. There is still a lot of room there.
You’ve also described your work as post-cyberpunk. What does that mean to you?
Post-cyberpunk is still cyberpunk, but the technology has advanced beyond the classical cyberpunk setting. We’re talking about societies that have already begun embracing things like immortality and other technologies that would once have seemed extraordinary. They are already part of the world.
And that creates the setting for whatever comes afterward, which could be something much worse.
Grimdark is another influence on your work. Does grimdark need to make readers uncomfortable?
Yes. Grimdark, being essentially dystopian, has to make you uncomfortable. There are different degrees of discomfort, and grimdark is toward the higher end. Readers should understand that it isn’t necessarily for the faint of heart. The genre can present violence graphically, including psychological violence.
Sometimes you do need to warn people. But if you tried to list everything someone might encounter, the warning could become an entire chapter. You can find almost everything in grimdark. If you want absolutely everything, though, you probably have to go to the splatterpunk writers.
Grimdark isn’t quite there. But sometimes it isn’t very far away.
Those Eyes connects to the larger story you’re building around Monsters. What role do these shorter stories play?
Those Eyes is a prologue, but it isn’t the entire prologue. It’s more like a slice of life involving the characters. I want to introduce parts of the world that way because, if I put everything into the main story, the main story becomes too convoluted.
The shorter pieces give it fresh air. They let me tell things outside the main narrative. So Those Eyes is part of that plan. It explains one side of a character, but it doesn’t explain everything about that character.
I think I can have fun with that idea: slices of these characters’ lives.
Did the world become larger than you originally expected?
Yes. The universe grew into something very large on its own. That’s why I started developing the main story and the side stories at the same time. It’s a lot of work, especially with the amount of time I have, or don’t have.
If you want to write something like that correctly, you have to sacrifice something. Building a universe that large takes work.
Will those stories eventually reveal where the characters in Monsters came from?
In part, yes. If you’re attentive while reading Those Eyes, you can already discover things about more than one character. You don’t have all the elements yet. Some of the characters’ origins matter because they’re connected to different generations and different parts of the larger story.
I don’t want to tell readers everything at the same moment. So you’ll learn things about the past, but when they’re relevant to the characters and the story.
Is this the kind of setting that could continue indefinitely?
The main story has an end. The universe has the potential to expand, but I’m not interested in exploiting everything simply because it exists. There can be stories connected to the main story in different forms and at different lengths. Some might be very short. Others could be longer.
But the important thing is that the main story has an ending. After that, we’ll see.
Stories like Those Eyes offer pieces of that world outside the main narrative, giving Lacoste room to explore characters, histories, and perspectives without forcing everything into a single novel. It’s an approach he was already building toward when we first spoke, and one that has continued to shape the project as Monsters has developed.
We’ll be talking with Sam again as Monsters gets closer to release, with a new interview focused on the finished manuscript, how the project has evolved, and what readers can expect from the story ahead.
