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"They will return to Guatemala, to Ecuador, and buy land, a small fruit plantation, farm equipment, two delivery trucks, they will hire more men to work alongside them and prosper. And when they retire to a hammock on the coast, they will send mocking pictures to immigration authorities, the Guatemalan army, and the Ecuadorian government, financial statements with nasty drawings in the margins. You sold us out early, but we were better than that. See how you cut us short; see how we rose above."

That's Brian Francis Slattery writing about immigrant dreams in Spaceman Blues--a hybrid of science fiction, political science, and kung-fu special effects. 

This first-time novelist is my special guest this week, and today he tells us how he constructed his fantastical landscape without sounding like a guy playing one long game of Dungeons & Dragons.

Welcome to my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson's mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing.

Jason Boog:
While your book has a number of science fiction elements, it is firmly grounded in the contemporary immigrant scene in New York City. What inspired you to take these everyday communities and turn them into something fantastical? How did you research and write these vivid scenes set in immigrant community settings--especially the "underground economies" that captivated your imagination?

Brian Francis Slattery:
Well, issues dealing with migration and the informal economy are kind of an obsession of mine--continue reading...

--particularly so when I was writing the book, so it was natural that it became such an important part of the story. I hesitate to call what I did "research" because it implies that I was much more focused than I really was.

But in every case where I talk about a place that actually exists with any level of detail, I either lived in the neighborhood that I was describing or spent enough time there that I thought I could describe the places accurately.

For the more fantastical places in the book, I drew really heavily on my own personal experience of being in places that were completely foreign to me, in developed and developing countries--but in those cases, when I exaggerated, I did so to try to recreate for the reader how it felt (at least for me) to be in a place like that, versus how the place actually was.

If that makes sense.