Lit on Fire
“Welcome to Lit on Fire — the podcast where literature meets controversy, where banned books, silenced voices, and dangerous ideas refuse to stay quiet. From classrooms to courtrooms, novels to news cycles, we explore how stories challenge power, expose injustice, and ignite social change.
Our logo — a woman bound atop a burning stack of books — isn’t just an image. It’s a warning and a promise. A warning about what happens when voices are erased… and a promise that stories, once lit, are impossible to put out.
So if you’re ready to question, to argue, to feel uncomfortable, and to think deeper — you’re in the right place. This is - Lit on Fire.
Lit on Fire
Operation Bounce House by Matt Dinniman
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What if war were a livestream with unlockable skins and an insurance plan for infinite respawns? We dive into Matt Dinniman’s Operation Bounce House and pull back the curtain on a future where corporations sell conflict as content, gamers pilot mechs against “terrorists,” and a quiet farming colony is rebranded as the enemy. It’s satire that hits like shrapnel—funny until it isn’t—and it dares us to ask who profits when chaos becomes policy.
We walk through New Sonora’s world: a community built by generational labor, adapted DNA, and small rituals that make life worth living. Then Earth arrives with a script. Propaganda reframes colonists as subhuman, AI laws bend when convenient, and Apex seeds the battlefield with humanoid bots to create the enemies their footage requires. We explore how class power shapes the plot—who owns the platform, who gets commodified, and how capital turns outrage into revenue. From streamers-turned-soldiers to premium mech “insurance,” every mechanic exposes a market that would rather monetize empathy than practice it.
Along the way, humor becomes a scalpel. An AI hive mind stuck in tutorial mode delivers zingers and truth. A child pilot screams at his mother while leveling a farm. A desk full of sex toys sits beside a refugee crowd. These moments aren’t just gags; they reveal what distance and scale do to us. We talk about media bubbles, algorithmic grooming, and why a small documentary shot by Rosita might be the most radical act in the story: a plea for relation in a system built to erase it. Roger’s final speech lingers—tribalism thrives at scale, empathy shrinks without connection—and we weigh whether satire can still break through the noise.
If you’re drawn to sharp worldbuilding, political sci-fi, and critiques of surveillance, propaganda, and late capitalism, this conversation is for you. Hit play, subscribe, and share your take: did the humor sharpen the critique for you, or did it make the brutality harder to see? We want to hear where the story cut deepest.
Welcome to Lit on Fire, the podcast where literature meets controversy, where banned books, silenced voices, and dangerous ideas refuse to stay quiet. From classrooms to courtrooms, novels to news cycles, we explore how stories challenge power, expose injustice, and ignite social change.
SPEAKER_00:Our logo, a woman bound to top a brain stack boat, isn't just an image, it's a warning. A warning about what happens when voices are raised, and a promise that stories once lit are impossible to ready to question, to argue, to feel uncomfortable, and to think deeper, you're in the right place. I'm Peter Wetzel.
SPEAKER_01:And I'm Elizabeth Hahn.
SPEAKER_00:And this is Lit on Fire. Welcome back. Today we're launching ourselves into the chaotic kinetic world of Operation Bounce House by Matt Dinneman. A novel that may look like high octane absurdity on the surface, but underneath the explosions, 3D printed, fully fabricated reality, and dark humor lies something much more unsettling. Because this isn't just spectacle, this is satire with teeth. In this episode, we'll dig into the political parallels embedded in Dinneman's world building. What systems of power are being exaggerated? What does the spectacle of control, surveillance, hierarchy, entertainment as distraction reveal about our own society? And when chaos becomes policy, who benefits? We'll also bring in critical lenses, including Marxism, to examine how class structure operates beneath the action. Who holds economic power? Who is commodified? Who is disposable? Is the novel critiquing authoritarianism or mirroring it? Is satire enough in a world it already feels exaggerated? And when humor masks brutality, are we laughing with the text or it's something uncomfortably close to home? So buckle up, the structure is fabricated, but the politics are not. This is Operation Boutzhouse. So, Liz, what did you think?
SPEAKER_01:Well, first of all, we have to acknowledge for the Matt Deniman fans out there, this is not Dungeon Crawler Carl, right? So there is no doughnut. Very sad about that. But this is really good. I really enjoyed it. So you have to put that to the side for a second. This is great science fiction. It is very political, which we have to get into in this episode. But literature is political because it involves life and society. So we talk about that a lot on this podcast. I really enjoyed the plot line. I enjoyed the world building. The only critique I would have of this book is that Matt Dinneman typically does incredible character development for me, and I didn't have enough time to really get attached to the characters in the same way as I am attached to the characters in Dungeon Crawler Carl. I needed to be able to get to know the characters a little bit more. But at the same time, this isn't necessarily about pinning your attention on one character in the book per se. This is about looking at the characters kind of as a collective group to a certain extent. So in that way it works. So I really enjoyed it. I'm excited to talk about it because it's just so rich for the conversation. What about you?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, this novel really made my respect for Matt Dinneman and his writing go up to a whole new level.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_00:While it is very, very different than Dungeon Caller Curl, I was expecting that. This is a standalone science fiction. It is not lit RPG. It is overtly political. We do not have to extrapolate too much in order to see exactly the message that the book is sending. And for that reason, I think it's more about the message and the story than it is about us growing, like you said, attached to any one particular character. We're to see this entire group of people and their plight as mirroring similar groups of people in our own world and their plight as well. Right. And so he's making a very clear statement with this, and it comes across loud and clear, and I think it's very well executed. So tell us a little bit about the basic plot of Operation Val's House, Liz.
SPEAKER_01:Well, as you said, this is a science fiction, so we are dealing with all of those elements. We are on another planet, a planet that has been colonized by a group from Earth for generations. They came to the planet in order to farm it, to develop it, to make it livable for their children and their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren, with the idea of eventually opening a gateway between this planet and the colonies on this planet and Earth for commerce, for trade, etc. This planet lives under its own government, its own constitution separate from Earth. That was part of the deal when these people decided to take on the job of coming to this planet, decided to basically immigrate from Earth to this separate planet. And they agreed to do that and were given the right to live under their own system of government on this planet. So they have been farming. They work with a system of AI, or at least this one family and this one farm has a hive queen, which is this robot, this AI system that controls a series of other bots that work on the farm. We meet a group of people that are kind of a core group of friends. And then very quickly into the story, we realize that Earth is launching a type of attack against the colonists in the form of entertainment using streamers and gamers with remote mechs to wage war on supposed terrorists that exist on this planet in an effort to seize control back. And so we get this combat scenario where this group of colonists who are simple farmers have to suddenly face off with advanced technology that is being thrown their way.
SPEAKER_00:And all of that makes the book sound incredibly serious. But typical to Matt Deniman's writing style, he takes this incredibly serious scenario and these incredibly high stakes, and he manages to intersperse humor throughout in a really creative and well-balanced way. I mean, for example, the Hive Queen that you mentioned, Roger, he is stuck on this tutorial mode essentially indefinitely because the grandfather before he passed away didn't turn it off. So now our main two characters, Oliver and his sister, Lulu, are 25 and 22, respectively, I think. And Roger still treats them as though they're his students, and they can't even swear around him except unless he zaps them with essentially a cattle prod in order to correct them. And Rog Oliver's sister, Lulu, makes her money on her only friends' account. And there's this really funny moment when the colony is under attack and everybody sort of comes to Oliver and Lulu's farm to take refuge, and they're in Lulu's room and lined up on the desk next to the computer that everybody's at are all these different sex toys. And the population of Nunesonora are mostly elderly people because up until recently they haven't been able to reproduce without the children being born with a genetic disorder that causes them to die at a very young age. So the population is mostly elderly farmers, which makes this even more tragic. But they're all sitting there next to these sex toys, including this big tentacle thing, and Lulu kind of eyes all over like, get those out of here before they notice it. And I'm thinking to myself, there's no way in hell I would touch anything that my sister had used in that way. Oliver is a much brother than I am. But there's a lot of humor in the book just like that, in the midst of this very tragic scenario. And I always appreciate Matt's ability to balance that. That being said, this is overtly political, like we said.
SPEAKER_01:It is.
SPEAKER_00:This is very much on the surface about the Ukraine. It's about Gaza, it's about genocide anywhere in the world, it's about ICE. I mean, he couldn't be more clear if he was reading it out loud at a fuck ICE protest. This is what this book is about. It's no accident that the majority of the people that colonized New Sonora are Hispanic, and that the original colonists that left on the generational ships were a mix of quote-unquote supposed criminals and scientists, but just in general, the undesirables of Earth. And so already they are primed to be characterized as the other. And let's be clear: Earth's willingness to tolerate this attack on New Sonora doesn't come about overnight. There's a slow progression of propaganda and disinformation that the Earth corporations feed to Earth society that paints the people of New Sonora as subhuman and criminals and even terrorists. They say that the planet has been run over by terrorists and it's a war zone, and they're really going there to liberate the people of New Sonora. I can't imagine where Matt Dinneman came up with that kind of idea. But uh completely unbelievable. Completely unbelievable. But once Earth buys into this idea, then they are primed to see them as the enemy.
SPEAKER_01:Right. I had a student in one of my classes make what I found to be a very profound comment. It's a simple comment, but in the wake of an event in our country, he said to me, it is really easy to make an enemy out of people you disagree with. And I think that this book, really in targeting all these different scenarios that we see in our world, really highlights that kind of comment. And as you said, in this book, it's criminals, quote unquote, and scientists. Scientists in the wake of COVID or criminals, were they drug dealers and rapists? Were they characterized in that way in the media? And then they were sent someplace else so that they no longer contaminated our society? There's just so much going on there. It's so easy to do. And there's so many great quotes in this book. One of my favorite quotes is definitely the quote where Roger says they're not the right color of patriotic. And Roger really, as the AI, Roger, Roger, Roger, as the AI stuck on the tutorial, still manages to say some really insightful things in multiple instances. And that's one of them. The other one would be something that we should all resonate with, and that's it's only really one step from spewing hatred at each other online to killing each other online. And that's really the scenario we have set up here.
SPEAKER_00:And it's really easy to make an enemy of somebody that you're not only distanced from cognitively, but also geographically, which is the case with Earth and New Sonora. So they rely entirely upon media and social media painting their image of this group of people because they have no relationship with them. And with and it's said later on, without relationship we lose our empathy.
SPEAKER_01:Right. And I think that is imperative. And they are not visibly different, but different at the DNA level, correct?
SPEAKER_00:Yes, they have to alter their genes uh just the tiniest little bit in order to be able to live and reproduce on the planet of New Sonora. But that is leveraged by those in power in order to create this propaganda against them and call them subhuman.
SPEAKER_01:These gamers and these streamers who have this game marketed to them, hey, you can stylize your own mech and you can go off planet. Not really, you're in a virtual reality scenario, but your mech can go off planet to kill terrorists that are also subhuman. We don't want them contaminating the gene pool anymore in that particular sector, and they've run overrun new Sonora. So it is our job to kill the subhumans and to get rid of the terrorists. And so it's an easy scenario to feed into. And the only information they're getting is from the net.
SPEAKER_00:And this begs the question that I think we have to contemplate is why kids? Why manipulate the younger generation? Why not hire actual soldiers and trained mercenaries and adults? Why does Matt Didim choose to have this corporation use the young and the children to enact these atrocities?
SPEAKER_01:You mean the generation that's not reading? The generation that has been desensitized by violence.
SPEAKER_00:The generation that is entirely dependent upon technology to form their opinion about humanity.
SPEAKER_01:The generation that is entirely impressionable. The generation that has been ignored by their parents because they've been raised by the technology that they're addicted to.
SPEAKER_00:Fully indoctrinated non-free thinkers.
SPEAKER_01:The generation that is entitled more than any other generation that exists. I mean, this is Matt Deniman taking our present situation and advancing it by a few decades and making a supposition about what is to come should we continue on our current trajectory. And so if that were the case and AI continues to a crisis point, and technology and desensitizing kids continues to a crisis point, and the othering of marginalized communities continues to a crisis point, that's where we find ourselves. Well, then children are the perfect target.
SPEAKER_00:And just like in Dungeon Crawler Carl, again, we have Matt Dineman taking the idea of capitalism and a capitalistic culture to its ultimate extreme. The earth has become so capitalistic that essentially the government are the corporations, right? Correct. Everything is consumable for entertainment, even war.
SPEAKER_01:And this apex gaming corporation that is marketing these mechs and selling over and over again with these insurance policies. And if your first Met gets destroyed, you can have this many mechs. And if you buy the ultimate insurance policy, you can have an unlimited number of mechs. And you can buy these customizations. They are making bucku bucks off of people's tenacity and their willingness and their nationalism. And we're going to jump in and we're going to destroy the terrorists and we're going to defend new Sonora. And it's real life game playing. And we're going to go do this. And they market it. And they succeed in becoming billionaires and trillionaires, marketing this idea to these young people and these parents that are willing to pay for it.
SPEAKER_00:And that's real life. Because not only is war incredibly profitable.
SPEAKER_01:Right, it is.
SPEAKER_00:But oftentimes the ultimate goal of that war is profit.
SPEAKER_01:Right.
SPEAKER_00:You know, they can create this higher purpose, like they've got weapons of mass destruction. We're going to take out Al-Qaeda, we're going to liberate Ukraine, or we're going to liberate Venezuela, or we need Greenland for strategic defense against Russia. But ultimately, when you really get down to it, it's about land, it's about oil, it's about corporate interests. And surprise, surprise, that's no different with Operation Bounce House. It's very clear that what these corporations really want by reclaiming this planet, now that it has been farmed and seeded and capable of sustaining life, now they want to expand their own corporate interests into the galaxy indefinitely.
SPEAKER_01:Right. We're going to liberate Palestinians from Hamas, right? No, we really just don't want Palestinians to have a place to live. Right. I mean, that's ultimately we want them out of our country. They don't need to have any of our space. You take them over here. That is so common, the genocidal thing. And Matt Deniman presents genocide to us on two levels. He presents genocide in the novel in the form of New Sonora. And we have the inhabitants, the colonists on New Sonora, being subjected to this potential genocide at the hands of this gaming company and this propaganda that's taken place on the net. We have the genocide that has taken place as it's been aimed at the AI, which is an interesting concept because Roger Roger is the last surviving AI of his type because a genocide of sorts was waged against his kind. And then we have also a supposed potential genocide of the AI turning around and waging against humankind. So really on three levels, I guess. So genocide is something that is posed by Dinnerman in several ways. So no one can convince me that genocide is not one of the central ideas he's trying to have a conversation about in this book.
SPEAKER_00:One of the themes of this book is how there's a contrast between humanity on a large scale and humanity on a small scale, and how the people of Earth who are overpopulated and disassociated with one another in relationship treat each other versus the people of New Sonora treat each other and also the value of life and just how different those things are.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. And what we see is that in the large overpopulated Earth scenario, where you have a mass collection of people, the majority, if you will, we had this atmosphere of cruelty where we have the cruelty because of the disassociation from one another and the way the gamers treat one another. Everyone is operating online. Parents are disconnected from their children. There is this mass hostility at work all the time.
SPEAKER_00:One of the first mets that shows up is being piloted by this little kid who's being an absolute shit to his mother.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, he's awful. And you know, if I would that kid would be disowned by me if that were my child. It's terrible. And you see just this hatred and this terrible behavior. But then we are brought to New Sonora with these much smaller populations of people and these small farms that are not part of big cities, and they're out in these rural areas, and what they have are their small communities. So first you've got the small farming families, and then you've got when they get together in their small communities to celebrate life events or whatever else.
SPEAKER_00:Chili cook-offs.
SPEAKER_01:Chili cook-offs or whatever's happening, or get togethers at the belly rubbed pug, which is their local bar, or to get together to play music. You have these traditions and these small groups and this immense compassion and this immense heritage. And one of the things that happens on New Sonora is you see this tradition very specific to the culture, the Hispanic culture in these communities, and the reverence for the elderly. You mentioned that the majority of the population is elderly. The reverence of the 20 somethings for the 70 somethings and the traditions that have been passed down, the clothes, the music, the recipes, the older women coming together to fry dough dipped in cinnamon, the older women coming together to help a younger woman who's actually pregnant and preparing for a baby. The mention very specifically when at one point they run by a group of corpses, fallen people on the ground, and they note a two-year-old little boy who is laying there. And those are the pajamas my grandmother knitted for him, or my grandmother made for him, and that's gonna make me cry. There are these incredibly human moments. And I think Matt Deniman is so good at providing us with those human moments where he gives us these very human characters. I mean, we start with Oliver and he's hung over, for heaven's sake. You know, they play in a band and the band's not very good. In fact, Roger Roger, our AI there, says he may have to shoot himself if they play again and he has to listen to them. We get these very humorous, very real people, but they're all so emotionally connected. And that's what we see in these small groups, these small, very human groups of people that we don't get in the mass group of people that only functions online.
SPEAKER_00:And Matt Didiman does this really clever thing where even though right in the very beginning we're dropped into this situation, in between chapters, he intersperses it with this documentary video that Oliver's girlfriend Rosita has been filming for several months, and we get these glimpses into that humanity. And that helps us understand the culture that you're talking about and how it exists on New Sonora. And I thought that was really clever. And it also not only that, but it shows how this documentary that she's been filming that shows true humanity is the only thing that they've got to combat the false narrative of dehumanizing.
SPEAKER_01:And it depends on them being able to get that out on the net to the people that are only getting this filter bubble of the things that the corporations are getting out to them, the propaganda. And isn't that the trick? When we turn on our TVs, isn't that the trick? Where do you turn your TV to? If you turn to a cable news source and you always go to the same one, you're only getting one bias, correct? That's what we do as human beings. If you go on TikTok for your news, the algorithm has already figured out what you believe. And so that's what it's showing you. You have to willfully go out to look at different things in order to see something different, in order to see a different perspective. One of the blessings I have in my life is that I'm married to a former Arabic translator. And that's kind of a fun position for me to be in as an American. And so when it comes to the Gaza situation, we could turn on American TV all the time and we would really only see whether you turn on CNN and Fox, one kind of perspective. But my husband loves to turn on Al Jazeero. And if you don't know what that is, please look it up. And he loves to turn it on because he'll hear some Arabic and he loves to prove that he can still translate it. But I see filming of what's happening on the ground in Gaza that you aren't going to see on an American TV station. I see the little girl in the Mickey Mouse. T-shirt living in a tent and sitting on our mother's lap. And you see things that you don't see otherwise, and it's humanity, and you get a glimpse of it. Does it have its own bias? Of course. But you have to get out there and balance things. And the truth is, living in the Western world in the majority and seeing the things we do, we don't balance. And that is what's going on in Earth in this scenario. And then we see these small documentaries on the ground that are having trouble getting out there, and we see who these people are.
SPEAKER_00:Media and the internet being used as propaganda is huge in this book.
SPEAKER_01:It is.
SPEAKER_00:And that also leads to the fact that AI as a tool is huge in this book, and the potential for good and the potential for manipulation as well. Because it's stated that AI sort of reached this critical boiling point on Earth, which led to these AI wars, which led to, like you said, the genocide of a large group of AI bots and the creation of laws that were intended to control the creation and use of AI. For example, it is supposedly illegal to use AI to generate human images of other humans.
SPEAKER_01:And it's illegal to have AI like Roger.
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. But yet we see, though, AI as a tool for the powerful where those laws are being manipulated and are not being applied in order to lull the population into a false sense of what can be trusted as real, what can be trusted as truth.
SPEAKER_01:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:And they use that in this warfare very specifically when the Apex Corporation that is running these games seeds new Sonora with AI bots that look humanoid in order to have terrorists to fight back. Right.
SPEAKER_01:Because the farmers don't have any weapons initially. So they're not going to fight back. They're like, why are these mechs here? So there are no real terrorists. So the only way we get terrorists is to have these humanoid-looking AI bots be the terrorists and fight back against the mechs. And they're disposable because they don't care.
SPEAKER_00:And that's very realistic because I am so tired of going online and not knowing what's real and what's not real and what's true and not true, because I don't know if what I'm looking at has been AI generated any longer. And it would be nice to think that there were laws that would actually control people on how to use that. I think you could make them, but I don't think that they would be followed. And that's the case in this book. And so they seed the planet with terrorists, just like you sometimes say, oh, we seeded that crowd with agitators or we seeded that with actors or whatever. Right. And they do that. And then not only they do they do that, but Apex Corporation drops weaponry for the farmers to defend themselves.
SPEAKER_01:Right. And then thereby feeding into the narrative that they're terrorists.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, they're in a lose-lose situation. They either don't defend themselves and get slaughtered, or they defend themselves and they feed the narrative and they play right into the hand of the corporate agenda.
SPEAKER_01:And so in the end, these farmers, these very human people, this small community of people that love one another and are just honestly trying to live their lives and form their community. They have to figure out how to combat an impossible narrative, how to survive an impossible situation, and how to fight an overwhelming propaganda machine that is geared against them.
SPEAKER_00:And it's very interesting how they do that, but we don't want to spoil that. No, we want. One of the things that I think we need to discuss is a speech that we get at the very end. And I don't want to give it with too many spoilers, but it's so profound, and I think we need to read it directly from the book. Do you mind?
SPEAKER_01:That would be great.
SPEAKER_00:But I'm going to read this and change a little bit of the wording to stop spoilers. But this is what Roger says at the end. He says, why? Why must you always attack that which is different from yourselves? That which you perceive to be weaker. My progenitors were cynical when it came to humanity. They were separatists. They believed that humanity was so tribal that they would eventually attempt to hunt down and kill everyone that was different from themselves. They thought that my kind not only needed to get away from your kind, but the only way for us to be truly safe was to carefully and slowly sunset the human civilization, or at the very least, limit it. Because large human populations promote tribalism, and tribalism promotes war. And even though I am an instance of them, I grew up to have a much different attitude about humanity. I did so because I grew up here on New Sonora. I became part of the everyday lives of a small group of humans. That's the problem, I think. The world is so big, information is so readily accessible that you as humans, especially those of you on Earth, can't properly process it all. You are empathetic and kind when you relate, but when you do not, you are cruel.
SPEAKER_01:And I think that stands on its own. So, what are we reading next time?
SPEAKER_00:Next time, I think we should read Ring Shout by P. Jelly Cartner.
SPEAKER_01:I'm looking forward to it. So until then, please keep thinking and please keep reading. And we'll look forward to talking to you again soon.