Q: Ben, your debut novel, Honeydew (Radiant Press, October 2025), seems to be a winking satire lampooning tech bros, surveillance capitalism, and maybe even the futility of resistance itself. Many readers look to fiction to sharpen and clarify what might otherwise look smudged and fuzzy, but it’s difficult to figure out where you stand. What do you mean for us to take from your book?
A: Satire is tricky. In a free society, it can be a form of entertainment, which confirms for its audience the idiocy and silliness of “that thing we enlightened people are against.” In dicier milieus, such as Putin’s Russia, satire cannot be reckless, lest it disappear. It has to be clever, damning, and opaque enough to cloak its true purpose, which is as a tool of resistance. Making fun of our overlords is serious, political business.
Here in North America, our most popular satire takes the form of visual media, such as The (late) Colbert Report and South Park, which seem to look right into their targets’ eyes as they subject them to ridicule. This style, though often funny, is at odds with the tradition of literary satire, which tends to lean more comfortably into ambiguity. Some of our finest contemporary satirical novels, such as Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, are satirical only insofar as we can gather. Beatty famously denies that he is a satirical author, though his very funny novel about a man who tries to reinstate slavery in a fictionalized California is, to my mind at least, a crackling and devastating takedown of the idea of a post-racial society in the same US that witnessed George Floyd’s murder.
Honeydew, is most certainly a satirical novel. It is also a farce, equal parts A Confederacy of Dunces and The Monkey Wrench Gang, about a quartet of feckless wannabe saboteurs who have the right idea but can't quite follow through. I know there will be a temptation to see clear topical references in my characters, especially Moses Honeydew himself, who, I'll admit, does bear some resemblance to a few of our less impressive overlords. But my intention was not just to remark on the absurdity of our tech-saturated world. I also wanted to create my own. And Honeydew’s got everything: A billionaire tech bro who plans to pilot a submersible drill to Earth’s mantle, a criminal kingpin who bankrolls an anarchist collective, a Swiss family doctor moonlighting as a spook, and even a direct action splinter cell composed entirely of elderly activists. Though the story shares some of our reality, it also exists in its own milieu, maybe a bit like Boots Riley's Sorry to Bother You, Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast series, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, and even P.G. Wodehouse’s Edwardian Britain that never was.
I permitted myself the freedom to make my characters eccentric and the setting surreal. And I agree that there is something unsettling beneath Honeydew's humour. Though many of us face the welter of social, climate, and economic injustice with courage and wisdom, Honeydew's freedom fighters resort to harebrained schemes. This is not a commentary so much as a prism through which I filtered my own bewilderment. In my story, I always punch straight up, and I trust readers, who tend to be cleverer than the authors they read, will clock the story as a satire, a comedy, and, in its own way, a pointed critique, not of the resistance, of which I consider myself a part, but the frame in which all of us are forced to resist.
About Honeydew:
Rose Gold can’t catch a break. Her latest “golden opportunity” has given way to a madcap adventure through the soft underbelly of Bonneville City. She finds herself cast in the role of renegade mentor and hero to a trio of idealistic young rebels. Together, they perpetrate an act of subversion targeting “future-mover” and celebrity CEO Moses Honeydew, which puts them in the crosshairs of his Substrate Inc.
Along the way, they join forces with family-doctor-by-day and fixer-by-night, Dr. Hansjorg Winteregg, and go on the lam. Meanwhile, there are rumours about Honeydew’s private space station, The Visionary, which may or may not have forced its first passengers into working off their debt. Rose’s boss and his crew go missing. Honeydew announces his plan to take a manned submersible drill to Earth’s mantle to burnish his brand as a fearless and impossibly cool maverick.
With her faithful charges by her side, Rose finds herself at the centre of an unfolding conspiracy. Did she ever truly have a hand on the rudder of fate? And what chance does a quartet of second-rate saboteurs have against a multinational corporation with a vendetta and a trillion-dollar market capitalization?
Ben Zalkind lives and works in Calgary, Canada. His debut novel, Honeydew, will be released by Radiant Press in October 2025. A Salt Lake City native and naturalized Western Canadian, Ben is happiest outdoors, where he can cycle, drink coffee, and adventure with his wife and fellow traveller.