Lucas Bale asked Michael Patrick Hicks:

Can you tell us a little about where your highly-rated story, Revolver, in our No Way Home anthology came from? Where did you get your inspiration?

Michael Patrick Hicks Revolver was inspired by a few different things. It's a dystopian near-future story, and it came from a lot of my own personal frustrations with American politics and gender issues. It's very political nature in nature, which is a bit of a first for me (I don't think Convergence was particularly political, and certainly not to the extent of Revolver), and draws from present-day anti-women, anti-poor (not anti-poverty, mind you, but quite literally anti-poor people) politics as filtered through US media, like Fox News, far-right-wing politicians, and those who fund them.

Aside from being mired in election season at the time of writing Revolver, Stephen King's work as Richard Bachman was a huge inspiration. The Bachman faithful might sense particular shades of The Running Man and The Long Walk (two of my personal favorites) through the narrative of suicide as game show. How well all this works, well, I'll leave that up to the readers, but I am happy to see it's striking a positive chord with several early reviewers.

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