Quantum Death Cults and Me – An interview with Stuart Buck 

Quantum Diaper Punks is the latest novella from Stuart Buck. Moving with alarming ease between the grand ideas of hard science and the piss stained fetichism of Age Play, it is at its heart a love story – just a very strange one. Here, Stuart Buck interviews Stuart Buck about what exactly is going on.

Tell us in a few words what Quantum Diaper Punks is about?

It’s a love story between two people who are extremely fucking lost. It’s a story about a cult, a fetish, hard science, philosophy, religion, shitting yourself and extremely potent drugs. It’s about what goes right and what goes wrong when you meet the one person in life who understands you and they just happen to be completely insane. But beyond and above all that, it’s about finding the answer.

There’s a lot of high science in QDP. Are you personally interested in that field?

I’m a massive physics nerd. Particularly Quantum and Astro. I write a science based Substack (stuartmbuck.substack.com) once a week. I had zero interest in science at school because it was taught by idiots to people who didn’t want to be there. But recently (as in, the past two years) I have been highly invested in Quantum Physics. I read an amazing little book by Carlo Rovelli called Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. He writes about science the way poets write about the moon. I think it helps that he is Italian, because he has this amazing romantic notions of the universe and it’s incredibly easy to get wrapped up in his stories. From there I read Brian Greene’s books about the multiverse and the universe. I am a major thanatophobe and one of the ways I can sleep at night is knowing that Quantum Physics tells us everything is wrong and we don’t have a clue what is happening. If we can’t work out life, we have no hope for understanding death. I much prefer the idea of not knowing anything to the expansive, screaming visions of hell I have every night when I should be sleeping. 

The Punks themselves are a kind of cult. You were in a cult right?

I had a nervous breakdown in London 15 years ago. I was working a high pressure job and I couldn’t stand where I lived or what I was. So I walked out of the office, picked a train at random and ended up in a place called Taunton in Somerset. While walking through the town, expecting to be homeless, I found a market. One of the bread stalls was run by people who called themselves The Twelve Tribes of Israel. They looked like hippies and offered me a place to stay as long as I worked with them in the bakery. As it turned out they were a huge cult, with places all over the world. It’s just another way that life looks after you. People are so uptight about making sure they have savings and belongings. But if you let them all go you end up in a mental cult. Travel light is what I’m saying. I got baptized as Nadiv, which means generous and true – ironic because the entire time I was there I was waiting to leave. I did one night, at 4am. It’s a true prison break story, but it ends in the lamest way possible, which is me having to walk 30 miles to a train station and taking a shit by the side of a motorway because I couldn’t hold it anymore. 

Your previous book, HYPNOPONY, was about outsiders hoping to find somewhere safe to exist. Would you say QDP has the same theme?

HYPNOPONY was about four guys who had zero interest in being a valuable member of society. They wanted to get high, jack each other off to pony videos and transform into cartoon horses through intense hypnotherapy sessions. This probably sounds fantastical, but Hypno-Ponies actually exist. They are a (tiny) subsection of the My Little Pony fandom, which I am involved in. At the end of the day, these weirdo bastards weren’t hurting anyone, and just wanted to be left alone. More and more we see this shit transfer to real life. People being hounded for being who they want to be. So QDP has the same themes, albeit in a more violent setting, because this is what people are going through day in day out. Life is very long, and its also very tremendous. But it can also be hard. People react in different ways. More and more people react in ways that are deemed violent, even if they aren’t physically violent. I think HYPNOPONY was about kids who were seen as violent even though they weren’t. QDP is about people who are actually violent. 

HYPNOPONY seemed to resonate with a lot of people who had spent a lot of time online. The way it was told (through chat logs), and it’s subject matter was very logged on. Where do you see the audience for a novella about Quantum Physics and Diapers coming from?

I didn’t expect HYPNOPONY to be as popular as it was but now I look back I can see why people resonated with it so much. Just replace Ponies with whatever fetish/fandom you are involved in and you can see why people found it weirdly comforting. I put an incredible amount of time into researching the Hypno-Pony forums. I spent months chatting to people on the discords, as well as the My Little Pony subreddits, hypnotherapy discussion groups, all sorts. One of the things that people have said to me is that the dialog dripped verisimilitude which means a lot to me because I worked extremely hard at that. 

I hope the same people who enjoyed HYPNOPONY will like QDP. It’s about little fucked up worlds that strain against normalcy until something breaks. There is also the same science, philosophy and religion running through both works. Every single one of my characters are lost. It’s funny, because the more comfortable I find my life, the more I want to write about people who don’t know what comfort means. I guess I’m not really living the edge-of-the-seat life I once was, so maybe I’m fake. But I have lived it. So I’m mining my memories while at the same time having enough time to actually write. This isn’t what the question is about. 

What do you make of the very real Adult Baby community? Do you think the Punks would have turned out differently if they had found that side of Reddit before turning to Quantum Physics and violence?

I think if you aren’t hurting anyone then I don’t care what you do. The overarching theme in AB role-play is the need for the person to return to a state before they had responsibility. To be cared for and tended to. Fetishizing the time when you didn’t have to pay the bills seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It’s entirely unsurprising that the majority of people involved in this subsection of life are 1) older men with stress-killer jobs and 2) younger girls with no fucking idea what to do now that their real life daddies have stopped paying for them. 

Bringing that back to the themes in the book, the characters in QDP have all been treated like shit by life, and see regression as a way to slip back into a way of life that doesn’t mistreat them. As life grinds you down more and more, why not pretend that you are a baby? Fuck it, we’re all going to die soon anyway.

You are self-publishing this title. I know you feel jaded about the entire literary submission process. How would you change it? What’s an ideal literary world for someone like you?

I would like it to be ten times less incestuous but I also have no patience on waiting around. My head is boiling with ideas. I don’t have six months to sit on my hands waiting for someone who only reads YA Vampire novels to tell me my story isn’t right for them. There are three presses I have any interest in publishing my work on and each one has waiting times I find interminable. And yes this is totally my fault and yes I will never get anywhere. But for me the passion and artistic merit I find is when someone messages me and tells me my gay horse story spoke to them. I’m not painting myself as some sort of Lynchian master. My stories are straight-forward. But they are about weird people and I don’t think publishers go for that sort of stuff. They probably do. Can you tell I don’t have a huge amount of confidence in these answers?