Whenever I receive an Unjust Depths question, for the past twelve to eighteen months I just haven’t answered it. I lacked the energy and impetus to answer. I realized that I have this space where I can definitively answer these questions and if someone asks, I can point them here. So I will do that. Being frank, I’m in a state of mind where I just don’t want to hear about Unjust Depths or think about it anymore. That is what motivates me. I want to put it to rest and move on with my current work.
I have tried to maintain a neutral tone as much as possible, but understand, this is a definitively emotional topic for me, so if I sound a little combative, it will just have to be what it is. Here are the most received questions:
Q: Why did you stop writing Unjust Depths?
This is the most difficult one so it is going out in front. For starters, I understand feeling a little betrayed that I wrote like two million words of fiction without anything even resembling an ending. I understand if you wouldn’t trust me anymore after that. To be frank, I wouldn’t feel that way about anyone doing stuff for free on the internet– but I understand where this comes from and the desire to have an answer.
A large part of the story of this is the part that I don’t want to tell, which is my personal life and my professional successes and failures the past couple of years. Let’s just say this, and leave it at this: stuff kinda completely fell apart for me and I just couldn’t keep writing the story I was writing. I’m not the person who wrote Unjust Depths, and not even in a transgender way. I was already transgender. I am blessed with continued survival in the world as a biological organism, but things are tough for me. I am not doing okay in a lot of ways. Not to elicit pity, just trying to explain.
Unjust Depths was an incredibly ambitious serialization project with a massive world with very unique constraints, including certain types of diction, as well as its release schedule. All of this was not only fine but incredibly possible for me in 2020 when it started. An ironic bad year for everything except staying indoors and writing. In 2024 it was just not possible anymore. That’s the closest thing to an answer I can furnish for you about this. I was both not interested in the work anymore and also not the physical, mental and philosophical human being who had started that work and felt confident in it. I changed too much and I just couldn’t do it anymore.
At that point, I had kinda given up on writing. But I’ve accepted that it’s a part of me that I can’t give up. I started a new project that from the ground up is just easier to write and keep up with. And that’s it, and where we are now.
For those of you who give Emptiness Effigied a chance, thank you, and trust me, this is the one. It has infinite capacity to hold genre divergences and one-off side stories and all those other things that web serial writers need to have to stay married to their work for longer. I might die before it’s finished but you’ll forgive that one, won’t you? That one is out of my hands. But I will keep trying my best.
Q: What was the ending going to be?
A metric ton of people die along the way including several of your faves but The Union wins the conflict in the end. Some antagonists survive so I can use them later but the victory is decisive for the communists and communism spreads through Imbria unabated. After discovering the existence of the Aer Federation as well as its technological legacy, like the STEM system, the Union declares itself not just the successor state of the Imbrian Empire but the successor state of the Aer Federation. There is conflict with the Republic of Alayze over this ambition but Astra (with some help from a burnt-out and disillusioned Murati who is fine with helping her) reunites Katarre as a sort of social-ultranationalist state. Billions of Katarrans are uplifted from poverty and cruelty and Astra is practically worshiped. This is Alayze’s worst nightmare. Katarre becomes a major participant and ultimately the leading one in a one-Aer regime alongside the Union and a defeated Alayze, The Aerean Union, focused on redistribution and a one-Aer culture that finally prioritizes staving off extinction and creating the stability necessary to come to grips with the total biosphere collapse. Eventually, Aereans are mostly Katarrans.
Eventually there are insinuations of future conflicts. Humans on Mars resolve their own conflicts (the possible status of Mars is something that would have been learned from the Aer Federation’s leftover data), declare a one-world regime, and contact the humans on Aer, very much disagreeing with the way the Aereans are conducting themselves, and there are some more wars that the Mars humans can’t win because the environment of Aer is too hostile to effectively fight in for them, and because Aereans have weaponized the hostility of it WAY better than the Martians’ more conventional technology. All of this wouldn’t have been shown in great detail, probably just a bleak little sort of encyclopedic ending note.
This was the plan, I am not joking. Would it have been good? I don’t know. Certainly, 2026 Madiha doesn’t think super highly of it, but she’s bias. I think there would have been some cool battles and very emotional moments. I certainly liked the character of Astra a lot and Katarre really interested me. The Mars stuff was maybe the hackiest thing there but it would have also been a fun setting element to have.
At least, that was the original plan. Starting with the Homa stuff, there was a ton of divergence from the plan as a response to what people liked and didn’t like from the story as well as my own diverging interests. You’ll notice the second book had a lot more esoteric and psychological stuff in it. That was me making it what I wanted to make it now, and not what it was going to be before. Kind of an effort to get the marriage working again before the divorce. Emptiness Effigied continues a lot of the themes that I am more interested in now along with the evergreen stuff from UD in a way that I like better.
Q: What’s the deal with the anarchist stuff?
A lot of the time when I talk about my work, I don’t like giving definitive answers. I want people to think about things for themselves and come to their own conclusions, whether it makes them think or reinforces their priors, I don’t care as long as they arrived at it through reading the work. So over the years people asked me this and I didn’t want to address this, or I responded with coy or joking things, because I just wanted this to be about the themes of the work and not about my personal feelings about anarchism. I still don’t want this to be about my personal feelings, even here at the end of it all.
I thought it would be interesting to write about radicals faltering on stuff that are big USAian blind spots, particularly axes of race and religion and religion-as-culture as well as the issue of nationalist liberation movements– pointedly with Muslims. Setting aside my personal beliefs on anything, while trying to explain: in my experiences on the USA internet I found a lot of people gravitating to anarchism who I observed also just internalized and reproduced a lot of anti-Muslim propaganda. They also didn’t want to understand the nationalist character of a lot of the related liberation movements in the region.
I was born and raised in a territory of the USA and I’m on the USA internet and mainly deal with USA people so I was writing with these things in mind. I think that one of the strengths of writing and of art generally is to explore and express and work through ideas and experiences you have. I decided to explore this theme and fascination of mine in my writing through pitting a like, left-ish but staunchly nationalist liberation movement against a kinda preppy anarchist movement born out of college politics.
(Majida wasn’t the sole vector for exploring liberationist nationalism– early on the story there is a left-nationalist movement that joins the Union, and they would’ve played a part in this theme eventually. Katarre, also, was a vector to talk about relatively sympathetic or at least protagonistic nationalists.)
It is a salient part of any critique of Unjust Depths what my politics are perceived to be, since politics are a big part of the work. I am not going to say I did a good job with this plotline, that’s for you to decide. I think if I really liked it a lot and stood by it and thought it was genius I would still be writing Unjust Depths but I’m not– so, there you go. But I also think people really picked the least interesting fights with this. I am not a movement figure writing propaganda, I’m just some lady. I don’t view Unjust Depths as building communism or creating community, I’m not that arrogant. It’s fine to disagree with me, but I feel like people who asked this question often had a need for me to be “right” or “wrong” in a way that lets them feel good about internet conflicts but doesn’t really elucidate anything meaningful.
Anyway if you didn’t like any of that stuff, read Emptiness Effigied.
Q: Is the Union intended to be a utopia? Does it represent your ideal state?
A lot of the response to the previous question remains salient to this question as well. I think it is not interesting to think of the Union as a utopia or think about my feelings on utopia or whether I am writing about my ideal state or politics. I for sure would like the Union better than my current conditions but that’s also true for a lot of people who aren’t marxists in 2026. Ultimately they’re the protagonists of the story. That in itself elevates them to a certain position. But they are also portrayed in ways that are ominous or sinister too. Nagavanshi is really fun and everybody likes her, but she’s also incredibly paranoid in a way that harkens to real world spymasters who made very contentious decisions.
Like I said before, I don’t think it is interesting to look for my personal feelings on the matter.
The Union was not inspired solely by the Soviet Union though it resembles it a lot because the Soviet Union remains a huge fascination of mine. It sprung out from the idea of a thrifty state surviving in this really cruel and bleak scenario. The Union was born out of the limitations of the setting, and the Empire is its contrast, a state that can spend massive resources to exploit its population into achieving things that seem impossible in the Union because they are impractical to underwater life. The Empire can break the rules of the scenario, and the cost of this is evident in all the suffering we see in the Empire. It is a recurring motif of the story that Union people are shocked by what the Empire wastes its time doing.
If the world wasn’t the way it was, the Union would look completely different. They would lose some of the things that people find utopian about them– they might be meat eaters, they might allow themselves a bit more wastage and a bit less efficiency. Lack of total surveillance and loss of some of the conveniences of their absolute ability to collect data and manage resources might lead them to more actions that inaccurately gauge discontent or incite it. They might look more like Solstice in The Solstice War, my first work, which the Union was in conversation with. Solstice has to reckon with more relatable social and political problems than the Union because they live in a world that is more like ours.
Q: What’s the deal with religion in Unjust Depths? Aren’t communists atheist?
Once again we need to refer to the above two questions, but I won’t restate the things I said there.
Religion is how a lot of humanity interpret struggle, punishment, hope, etc– I find it fascinating and important to think about. Religion is also used to oppress and people are oppressed for their religion, for example, Muslims. There is a lot of the work that was concerned with Muslims and particularly how they are viewed and treated and used by non-Muslims and by the political powers in the setting– but this is not just something unique to Unjust Depths, it is an issue of great urgency in our world, so you can understand why I would be drawn to exploring it in my art in the times we live in. Again, I am not going to speak on the quality of my work, but I didn’t want to just reproduce narratives that would make me look like a good or bad communist or whatever to the reader– I wanted to try to write a good story.
Anyway.
Those are the big ones that I receive over and over. If you have a novel question about Unjust Depths, I am just never going to answer it. I would rather not think about Unjust Depths again and focus my creative efforts on Emptiness Effigied. Thank you for reading this far, have a pleasant life.