Anthony DiMaria spent many years as a typical New York City writer, creating plays, short stories, and screenplays. But unlike the shorter-form works from his earlier writing career, DiMaria’s debut novel, Bots, is a science-fiction mystery novel that clocks in at about 300 pages. Set in a far-future city called New Lucien, Bots is about what happens when a megacorporation creates fantastic biotech that allows humans to upgrade their own bodies. The face of the corporation is Asymta, the beautiful social media–star daughter of one of the biotech corporation’s founders:
Asymta Tik is in a small circle with others who linger on, enduring her last hour of a Moonbeam party, held to celebrate each full moon in this coastal city, New Lucien. The party will continue another few days and with maybe enough support, through the next weekend as well. Asymta will not endure as she is a vital part of her father’s company, Goaldened. She will be needed there this week and every week. Asymta stands oblivious to her stunning presence, sometimes waving limbs like a crazed animal fleeing from prey. Predation committed by anyone with eyes to drink in her magnificent beauty. Asymta is the physical product of her pedigree: dark complected with a mocha skin draped over a lean, powerful young body having enough height to rule her immediate situations with ease. She glides and captures the gaze of anyone who catches a glimpse of her large, locking, emerald eyes.
Asymta is one of the highest-profile representatives of biotech, but soon she notices that there seems to be someone hacking everyone’s tech—which is to say, hacking into their very bodies and minds. Who is responsible for these attacks, and what is their goal? Readers can only find out by getting their own copy of Bots, the novel Kirkus Reviews calls “an offbeat and refreshingly different cybercrime mystery.”
DiMaria lives in Brooklyn and works in technology, so creating a science-fiction world with far-future biotech came naturally to him not just in terms of the exciting advancements that might be possible, but in the more troubling consequences of making our bodies more like machines. “The merging of man and machine is happening now,” he says. “I am a proponent for technological advancement, but I am also concerned about the implications. We have seen how divisive internet information can be, true or not.”
The kinds of advancements DiMaria writes about in Bots may seem far-fetched, but all of them have a firm basis in our current reality. DiMaria is up to date on the latest in “invasive technologies” and research into gene editing. Of course, he isn’t the first science-fiction author to base his worldbuilding in reality. According to Kirkus, though, while Bots has “all the makings for a cyberpunk potboiler, DiMaria manages to evoke a world of tomorrow while avoiding William Gibson–style clichés.”
When it came to transitioning from short-form writing to a long novel, DiMaria found the change to be a rewarding one. He liked how the novel gave him more time to flesh out his characters, and he was surprised to notice how he was able to transfer skills from outside his literary career to planning out his novel. “My experience as a software architect and a musician gave me practice in mapping out the creative process and contingencies,” he says. “The structural approach was the trick. I treated it like a project I had to finish.” And just as with his short stories and screenplays, DiMaria took his time getting to know his characters. “I share time with them. I respect and report their decisions, even if I don’t agree with them. The longer my time with them, the more genuine and intricate their portrayals. With that comes a deeper set of values, interconnections, and reactions based on those values.”
But Bots isn’t only a science-fiction novel, it’s a mystery. DiMaria is also a mystery lover, especially if it’s the kind of mystery story that “challenges our ingrained beliefs.” And setting a mystery within a world full of new technology offers the writer a whole new range of possibilities. “The scientists involved with the technology must possess exceptional intelligence by virtue of their work and innovations,” says DiMaria of the corporation that invented the biotech in Bots. “They are also practitioners of the scientific method, meaning they can craft a plan that includes contingencies. This is a running start when planning and executing an unsolvable crime.”
When asked what surprised him the most about the finished novel, DiMaria says that he was pleasantly surprised both by how much the finished book deviated from his original plot and by how much those changes improved the novel as a whole. There was also an earlier version where the character Asymta functioned differently in the plot, and the four sections told from her point of view didn’t exist. “I've gotten great feedback regarding those moments,” says DiMaria, “I must admit it comes as a relief. I wasn’t sure if it would be decipherable or enjoyed. It seems to have worked.”
Kirkus agrees that it works and calls Bots a “breath of fresh air in a subgenre that too often feels like reboots of the same operating system.”
DiMaria fans also have two upcoming projects to look forward to. The first is a story DiMaria is co-authoring about the other writer’s neurological condition, which is set to be out in Fall 2022. The other is another novel set in the world of Bots, on an island full of “not so typical aliens, motorbikes and their mechanics, an elderly war hero, and the hunt for a unique item only found in a few places on Earth.” DiMaria’s working title for this book is My Motorbike to Heaven. “It’s fun and strange,” he says. “Like me, I suppose.”
Chelsea Ennen is a writer living in Brooklyn.