Aaron Ryan lives in Washington with his wife and two sons, along with Macy the dog, Winston the cat, and Merry & Pippin, the finches.
Aaron Ryan is the author of the “Dissonance” series, several business books on multimedia production penned under a pseudonym, as well as a previous fictional novel, “The Omega Room.”
When he was in second grade, he was tasked with writing a creative assignment: a fictional book. And thus, “The Electric Boy” was born: a simple novella full of intrigue, fantasy, and 7-year-old wits that electrified Aaron’s desire to write. From that point forward, Aaron evolved into a creative soul that desired to create.
He enjoys the arts, media, music, performing, poetry, and being a daddy. In his lifetime he has been an author, voiceover artist, wedding videographer, stage performer, musician, producer, rock/pop artist, executive assistant, service manager, paperboy, CSR, poet, tech support, worship leader, and more. The diversity of his life experiences gives him a unique approach to business, life, ministry, faith, and entertainment.
Aaron’s favorite author by far is J.R.R. Tolkien, but he also enjoys Suzanne Collins, James S.A. Corey, Marie Lu, Madeleine L’Engle, C.S. Lewis, and Stephen King.
TBE: A major twist in ‘Dissonance: Volume II: Reckoning‘ is that the human military leadership, including the President, has become corrupted and arguably more threatening than the alien gorgons themselves. What inspired this subversive narrative pivot?
Aaron Ryan: Isn’t that so maddening? The very people you’ve counted on for support, leadership and protection are the very ones that you’re now trying to protect yourself from. It’s an extremely unwelcome power differential that creates a war on two fronts. Believe me, that wasn’t in my mind from the first book’s genesis as far as the original plot. However, when the first DTF burst and rolled over the Cumberland, killing off so many gorgons and taking Cameron and Rutty by complete surprise, I knew that was the direction I had to go. Cameron is a cynic anyway. Ergo, something major like this happening behind the scenes, without his knowledge seemed to suggest nefarious dealings: I just took that ball and ran with it, and it’s turned out to be a serious nuisance for our protagonists. Vladimir Nabokov said, “The writer’s job is to get the main character up a tree, and then once they are up there, throw rocks at them.” But what if there were TWO people throwing rocks at them?
TBE: Reckoning introduces the terrifying new “behemoth” variant of the gorgon species. How did you go about conceptualizing and designing these more formidable alien threats?
Aaron Ryan: It’s hard to imagine something that is addressed as ‘behemoth’ as anything other than a giant troll, so at first, I had to subtract them from my mind. They’re definitely gorgons, and as such they have similar biology. But they needed to be lumbering, brutish, spastic, and hugely threatening in ways that the regular drone or berserker gorgons have not been. There needed to be a malice there, and a willingness to endure the close-proximity assault of a DTF device in order to try to smash through the hulls of a few Abrams tanks. Their intelligence is still limited. Notice for example that they just tried to smash through the hulls of the tanks as opposed to immediately disabling the DTF emitters on the tanks. But they are fierce, strong, and vast…and any monster that has those three qualities in any genre is something we’re instantly afraid of. No ant wants a human to step on them. In this case, we’re the ant.
TBE: A major part of the narrative involves Jet being branded a fugitive by his former military commanders. Did you draw any inspirations from historical examples of resistance against authoritarianism?
Aaron Ryan: Not other than just generalisms. I wanted to be very careful in drawing upon any historical tropes or archetypes because we’re a little further into a post-apocalyptic future of Earth than some people might be comfortable with. Some have posited that sixteen years is far too long a time for the power to still be on. Some have said that Internet couldn’t possibly be running. Well, the truth is that in all of that overgrowth, there are still people moving around: brave humans desperately trying to keep the power on keep things running. So, in the end, those are the historical examples of resistance against, well, everything. We survive. We live on. We won’t go quietly into the night, us humans. So whether you’re a front and center leader against a tyrant, branded as a renegade and a fugitive, or you’re slinking around in the shadows trying to keep the power on, or you’re working shoulder to shoulder with the primary antagonist, yet trying to subvert her under her very nose, we’re all renegades against authoritarianism.
TBE: The character of Captain Vance Cardona plays a pivotal role as a disillusioned whistleblower against the corrupt regime. What was the inspiration behind his arc and perspective?
Aaron Ryan: There had to be someone. Resistance always starts with a mindset, and who better to implant that mindset into than someone who had been working up at the very top and saw the corruption close-up and firsthand? Someone needed to come from the inside and commit the ultimate act of revolt, sabotaging their well-being and perhaps even their very life by speaking truth to power. When that ultimately falls on deaf ears, you go rogue and start to amass support from like-minded individuals who are equally committed to the dismantling of tyrannical and authoritarian leaders. Thus, the resistance begins.
TBE: Characters like Private Foxy, Captain Cardona, and Pastor Rosie act as moral counterweights to Jet’s more visceral mindset. How did you approach developing these complementary perspectives on ethics and truth?
Aaron Ryan: Rosie literally surprised me. I was not prepared for her to take on such a pivotal role, but I did need someone material on the “light side of the force” to balance out the dark side that is President Graham. She became that balance. She was close to Jet’s brother Rutty, and that is a connection that Jet has to him through her, that is precious. Foxy becomes a surrogate little brother: he’s the same age as Rutty. In fact, in the prequel, there’s a gigantic reveal between Foxy and Rutty, and it’s awesome and beautiful and restorative. Cardona becomes the quintessential poster-boy fall guy in the whole affair, and Jet is simply falling in with those whom he knows without a doubt he can trust. You’ll see how all of this fleshes out even further in Volume III, and I think it’s amazing how the relationships have grown. I’m very pleased with the development and maturation of all of them.
TBE: The novel doesn’t shy away from killing off major characters. Was this a difficult decision, and how did you try to handle such devastating moments with appropriate weight?
Aaron Ryan: Incredibly difficult and incredibly painful. I don’t like playing God in my books. But as we all know, the primary protagonist needs to go into his final battle alone, or nearly. All extraneous characters or distractions eventually peel the focus away from our main character, and provide substory that can be taxing. People want to see resolution, and they want to experience the downfall of enemies that are consistently eroding our main character’s progress. So, yes, I had to kill off more characters. The one I simply could not kill off, because it would have killed me and may in fact have killed Cameron Shipley in the process, is Foxy. That would have been nothing short of an utterly Zeus-like stroke, apathetic and cruel. “Oh, your beloved brother was killed violently? Well, here’s a replacement for you that will bring you comfort and become your new little brother. Oh by the way I’m going to kill him soon too.” That wouldn’t make sense. In many ways Foxy becomes Jet’s motivation to go on, and he helps Jet stay the course, becoming, in his own way, a stand-in for Rosie when she’s not around, helping him stay on the straight and narrow. But the others, it was tremendously moving to kill them off, and I wept, as I had when I had killed off Rutty. I wept deeply and lengthily, and it was SO hard writing them out of the story, because I had come to love them.
TBE: There are some harrowing scenes of human-on-human violence and ethical dilemmas, like when Jet takes drastic action against a crewmate. How did you navigate depicting such morally gray areas?
Aaron Ryan: As the story goes on, I think the reader benefits from microcosms of the greater conflict. Smaller, more intimately-felt parallels that echo the larger struggle remind the reader of the stakes in question. Thus, Amos in the church. Or Jet and Hofstetter leaving Mammoth Cave. It also serves to advance the struggle that Jet is in some ways not so very different from President Graham in that regard. He’s a fragile human vulnerable to making the wrong choices just as she was. But he can rise past that and show his true colors of heroism rather than vigilantism. He can honor the death of those he loves by making choices full of integrity. He doesn’t have to stoop to the level of primal violence just to accomplish his ends. And as a subtle undercurrent to all of that, Jet has only just been a few weeks removed from the death of his brother on a suicide mission. The cold waters of thirst for vengeance still run through him. He is having to make choices to reject those waters and choose right. He obviously fails along the way, and that’s called learning.
TBE: Reckoning seems to argue that preserving individual conscience may be the last line of defense against civilization’s full ethical collapse. What kind of philosophical readings or life experiences fed into this thesis?
Aaron Ryan: I’m a Bible-reader, and a big believer in the power of faith. So, obviously there’s that. But I’ve also read fantastic books like The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. (Boy, if that book isn’t about mindset, then I don’t know what is!) However, a simple Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or Instagram scroll these days can yield a hundred different inspirational phrases a week, many of which have to deal with mindset. Especially in this day and age when we’re so divided politically, we’re being pulled this way and that by negative forces and they are oftentimes far easier to listen to. As a voiceover artist, I’m often presented scripts that conflict with my beliefs. They contain profanity that I don’t want to voice (I’ll never say the F word on record, for example), they support candidates that I don’t want to support, or they champion causes that I don’t believe in. My individual conscience informs me as to whether that’s something that I really want to lend my voice to or not. It always boils down to that, doesn’t it? That’s one of the great tropes of any story or movie: it all comes down to choice. You must choose which path to take, and we have to do that a thousand times a day anyway.
TBE: While incredibly cerebral, the book is also relentlessly cinematic with intense action set pieces. How did you balance the philosophical meditation with delivering visceral genre thrills?
“Relentlessly cinematic!” I love that, and that makes me so happy, because that’s how I intended to write it. Many readers have expressed how visual the book is, and the images it helps to conjure up. That’s truly how I wanted to write them: along the lines of a screenplay. That has in fact lent itself to Dissonance Volume I: Reality being contracted by a screenwriter as we speak, converting it to screenplay for pitching to producers with Netflix, Apple TV+, Paramount+, Prime Video, and the likes. I’ve so wanted that, and so longed for it to be made into a major production so that more people could experience it. Any good book (or movie) needs crescendos and decrescendos. Deep dives, and surfacing for air. Climaxes and respites. I think I strove to write it in a rollercoaster fashion so that Jet can actually get out of his head and prove that he can do the job, both to himself and others. And he does so, masterfully, as a good soldier and tactician, surviving attacks and flights, using his wits, and maintaining fierce determination to survive. He wouldn’t be the latter without the former, of course. You can’t think clearly in battle if you’re unable to think clearly out of battle. He does a lot of thinking. He’s very much like me in that regard.😊
TBE: The ending leaves Jet and the rebel alliance in a very precarious position going into the final volume. Without spoilers, what can readers expect from this escalating conflict?
Aaron Ryan: People have simply no idea of the enormity coming their way. There is conflict after conflict after conflict in Dissonance Volume III: Renegade spanning 431 pages, 100 more than in the preceding two novels. It’s…EPIC. I really wanted the grand oeuvre for the finale, and something that takes the stakes to massive levels and sees all kinds of new characters introduced, all united against tyranny on multiple fronts. The book is going to introduce some new levels of tension, but some incredibly satisfying measures of resolution that hopefully will leave the viewer pumping their fist in the air. For sixteen years, these gorgons have been here, but they are finally kicked to the curb (we think? Sequel someday…? 😊), and other contrarian forces are slowly eliminated.
Honor is restored with some characters you thought were nefarious. Battles are waged in relationships, real life and in cyberspace, and all throughout, Jet is propelled and motivated by the sadness he carries from the loss of three people so precious, and bolstered by the life-giving friendship of Foxy. But you’ll see him in a tank, at an Air Force Base, in an F-15 Eagle, on an aircraft carrier, and more. It truly is an adventure, and the magnanimity—and success—of the resistance is revealed at last.
TBE: Reckoning has been praised for pushing artistic ambition within the genre fiction space while retaining a page-turning quality. How important is it for you to straddle that line between substantive ideas and accessibility?
Aaron Ryan: One of the best compliments I’ve been given over and over is that Dissonance is “an easy read.” I really appreciate that. It is accessible, and I’ve strived to that end. I have a decent vocabulary but don’t seek to drown my reader in my impressive array of words. The best way to communicate a point is to do it naturally. I’ve learned that in voiceovers all too well. When the dialogue and the characters are people the reader feels they can relate to, they’ll keep going. They’re emotionally invested into that character and their story arc, so they’re willing to go to and through some very dark places, because they consider that person a friend, even if in those places they have to confront some of their own demons as well.
I’ve come up with a lot of fantastic ideas in my books that I’m very proud of, and Dissonance wouldn’t be Dissonance without dissonance. That subtle nagging feeling that people aren’t getting along, still, even after sixteen long years of occupation, is irritating. People want there to be unity and the getting rid of the bad guys. They don’t want to see division in the ranks. I think as you progress through the trilogy you begin to see a coalescing of unity on a much broader scale, as opposed to the small pockets of disunity and dissonance that we’ve seen in people like Captain Stone, Amos, Hofstetter, Armstrong, Romano, etc., and even between Cameron Shipley and Joe Bassett, who at first were at odds.
That distrust eventually leads to unity and camaraderie that is so desperately craved and needed in such a time. It pays off in huge dividends for the reader in the end, and I think there are so many colossal fights that happen in Dissonance Volume III: Renegade that it becomes that hard-fought peace in the end that is so ultimately satisfying for the reader. I hope they thoroughly enjoy the whole trilogy! Dissonance Volume III: Renegade releases this Saturday, May 18th, 2024!