Scott Lynch was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1978, the first of three brothers. Early in life he worked as a dishwasher, a waiter, a graphic designer, an office manager, a cook, and a game supplement self-publisher before accidentally selling his first novel, The Lies of Locke Lamora, in 2004. From 2005 to 2016 Scott also served as a paid-on-call firefighter in Wisconsin. Scott currently lives in Massachusetts with his wife, award-winning SF/F novelist Elizabeth Bear, plus four cats (Duncan, Gurney, Molly, and Fafhrd) and a pair of Icelandic horses (a gelding named Ormr and a mare named Spola). “Kaiju Agonistes” is his second appearance in Uncanny, a darkly humorous story of Cold War politics, featuring a giant sea monster.
Uncanny Magazine: “Kaiju Agonistes” deftly blends speculative elements and historical events in a fun take on classic kaiju tropes. What was your starting point or inspiration for the story?
Scott Lynch: Yeesh, where to begin? I wanted to write something in a heightened satirical reality, with that sort of tired cynicism and brittle wit that all the best narratives of the Cold War seem to capture. Not sure if I pulled it off, but I know what I was aiming for. Nixon Agonistes by Gary Wills was another starting point, a book that’s ostensibly nonfiction but feels like heightened reality just because Tricky Dick was such an unfathomable circus of a human being. Throw in They Walked Like Men by Clifford Simak, a deeply flawed and brilliant little book that toys with the question of what happens when human economics meet unanswerable forces from beyond our planet. Mix in a general love of big monsters and a soupçon of frustration with our broad-spectrum dipshittery as a species, et voila.
Uncanny Magazine: What research did you do for this story? Was there anything interesting you turned up that you weren’t able to include?
Scott Lynch: There’s nothing like refreshing one’s knowledge of atmospheric atomic bomb testing to renew one’s sense of misanthropy. And there’s nothing like reading James Baldwin and watching his interviews to help pull yourself back from the edge. Once you start writing an imaginary version of James Baldwin you don’t want to stop, you want to go on for thirty thousand words, but there’s no point to that—Baldwin already castigated everyone and everything you’re angry at, and did it better than you, and did it sixty years ago. So you have to let yourself have just a little James Baldwin, as a treat.
There was originally a section of “Kaiju Agonistes” in which Haruo Nakajima, the very first performer who ever donned the Godzilla suit, gets the news of a real monster attack while taking a cigarette break. In a longer version of the story there might have been room to go there, but for magazine purposes this thing was already popping its seams; for that and a few other reasons I decided instead to conjure a timeline in which Godzilla wasn’t filmed in 1954.
Uncanny Magazine: As someone who has written multiple novels, what was your favorite part of writing at a shorter length? What was the most challenging thing?
Scott Lynch: Writing short fiction has always been a different skill set than writing at novel length; I completed a few short stories when I was around twenty, but after selling my first novel I didn’t sell a piece of short fiction professionally for five more years. It was hard at first, and most of my short work is still firmly in novelette territory. I’ve finally started to work successfully at shorter lengths, but it’s still not my preferred methodology—when you start creeping up on the novelette space, you can smash two or three story ideas together in one piece without the need for the honed austerity that drives shorty-short-short fiction. If my wife is reading this right now she’s giggling. Hi, sweetie.
Uncanny Magazine: Are you a fan of kaiju films? Do you have a favorite?
Scott Lynch: Like all good-hearted people, I like giant monsters and the storytelling possibilities of giant monsters. I’m fortunate enough to hail from Minnesota, the cradle of Mystery Science Theater 3000, so I was introduced to Gamera at a very young age. Godzilla 1985 had come out just a couple years before that and genuinely frightened me. The video game Rampage was also big in the late 80s, and there was stuff like the giant ro-beasts in Voltron. Big stompy stuff everywhere for those with eyes to see. Nearly forty years ago I had a vivid nightmare that I was being hunted by an allosaurus through the back yards of the houses on my parents’ suburban street, and that sense of horrified wonder has stayed with me since. Most recently, I don’t think you can call yourself a citizen of the world if you haven’t bawled your eyes out watching Godzilla Minus One. An incredible piece of work.
Uncanny Magazine: Who are some of your literary influences? What is something you’ve read recently and loved?
Scott Lynch: In the past half-year or so, I’ve been completely enraptured by Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy. I had seen the TV adaptation several times, it’s utterly superb, but I hadn’t previously read the source novels and goddamn, they merit the hype. Such a mastery of voice and viewpoint, phrasing and atmosphere. Mantel was a genius. I immediately started trying to fold everything I could learn from her into my own work. I also recently finished Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory, which is harrowing as hell, and I’m currently returning to Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, which I haven’t read in twenty years. It’s even better than I remember, down to every last dusty moment of human stupidity and every last delicious curlicue of jaw gymnastics. One of those novels that really has our number. The United States, I mean. It makes a chill run down your spine, the way it sees us.
It’s not all classics up here in this ivory tower, though. I’ve also been binge-reading a bunch of jank-ass old BattleTech novels as a guilty pleasure lately. I’m not proud. Giant robots go boom.
Uncanny Magazine: What are you working on next?
Scott Lynch: My forthcoming Gentlemen Bastards novella, More Than Fools Fill Graves. Plus the conclusion of my new short story, “Locke Lamora and the Bottled Serpent,” which will be in Grimdark Magazine for January 2025. Plus a new short story for a licensed property I can’t talk about yet—perhaps by mid-January. Plus I suppose I have another novel, or so I hear. And a secret project for 2025 I don’t get to announce just yet. And I’ve been playtesting a cooperative boardgame. Oh, and my country’s lost its fucking mind again. I look forward to surviving that, hopefully.
Uncanny Magazine: Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us!
© 2025 Caroline M. Yoachim
