Diana introduced herself as a Canadian author currently living in the United States, a move that has raised a few eyebrows back home given the current political atmosphere. She didn’t dodge that. But what really stood out was how quickly the conversation shifted from biography to craft, and from craft to consequences.

A few years ago, Diana found herself stuck in a job she described as deeply unfulfilling. Then an idea started nagging at her hard enough that she could not ignore it. Her husband encouraged her to take the leap and write full-time, which is easy advice to give and hard advice to follow. She followed it. Months of long writing days later, the novel landed, published just before our chat and already getting a lot of attention.

The book sits firmly in speculative fiction and uses that space exactly as the genre should. It asks a pointed “what if” question and follows it through without flinching: “What if the only way to save the planet is to kidnap the billionaires destroying it?” In Diana’s near-future, five billionaires are abducted by a group of women and held in a concealed, high-tech facility. While they are there, they are pushed through psychedelic-assisted therapy and forced to collaborate, not only with each other, but with the people they would normally dismiss or ignore. It’s an environmental crisis story, yes, but it’s also a story about power, moral responsibility, and whether change is even possible for people protected by wealth.

One of the most striking parts of our conversation was how personal experience feeds the worldbuilding. Diana spoke about her own experience with psychedelic-assisted therapy during a very dark period in 2018, and she credits it with saving her life. She has since trained as a facilitator, which means the therapy element in the novel is not just a plot gimmick. It has weight. She understands the psychology, the vulnerability, the risks, and the way trauma and healing can play out when people are forced to face themselves.

That feeds directly into how the billionaires are written. Diana admitted she started from a fairly blunt moral stance, the idea that billionaires are villains by definition because extreme wealth requires extreme harm. But as she wrote from their perspectives, her thinking became more nuanced. They are still morally compromised, but they are also human. That shift matters, because the whole story becomes more uncomfortable and more interesting when you cannot simply write them off as monsters. It raises the question Diana kept circling back to: if greed and domination are treated like sickness, can they be treated, and who gets to decide?

Worldbuilding does a lot of heavy lifting here, and Diana showed real restraint. She built a setting that feels like an extension of the world we are already living in, not a distant future with shiny toys. There’s just enough tech to make the premise workable without breaking plausibility. The abductions rely on a Star Trek-inspired transporter-style device she calls the “Emergex”, which allows people to be moved instantly. The facility itself is hidden using protective technology that she does not over-explain, partly because she is not pretending to be a scientist and partly because she wanted the focus to stay on the ethical and psychological pressure, not on diagrams.

That restraint is a craft choice worth paying attention to. Too much explanation would tip the book into hard sci-fi, and that is not what she wanted. “Sci-fi light” is how she described it, and it fits. The tech is there to remove the obvious blockers so the moral problem can take centre stage.

And the moral problem is messy. Psychedelic therapy depends heavily on “set and setting”, meaning mindset and environment. It is hard enough when someone chooses to be there. In Diana’s story, the billionaires are kidnapped and coerced, which creates immediate ethical friction. She talked about how she handled that, including a micro-dosed compound used to keep them calm and more compliant. It’s practical. It’s also morally murky, which is the point. The book wants you to argue with it, not simply nod along.

That links to one of the richer themes we explored: Diana intentionally avoids giving the reader a neat moral exit. There’s no clean hero, no tidy villain, and no simple “message”. Instead, the story keeps pulling you back to the same uncomfortable question: does the end justify the means? Diana’s goal was not to preach. It was to provoke real conversation.

We also talked process, because Diana’s process is not the spreadsheet kind. She describes herself as a “pantser”, someone who writes without heavy outlining, letting the story reveal itself as she goes. Meditation plays a big role for her, both for generating ideas and for breaking through blocks. She was honest about the trade-off too. Writing this way can mean more editing later, but it also allows characters and themes to surprise you. She gave examples of characters who evolved beyond their original function, including a billionaire who developed a softer, more human edge than she expected.

By the end of the conversation, what stuck with me was the combination of ambition and restraint. The book takes on climate collapse, inequality, extreme wealth, and coercion, but it does it through character psychology and carefully chosen worldbuilding moves, not lectures. It is speculative fiction doing what it does best: rooted in reality, close enough to hurt, and just strange enough to make you look at the real world sideways.https://www.dianacolleenauthor.com/

If you like near-future stories that ask pointed questions, refuse easy answers, and still remember that humans are complicated, They Could Be Saviors is worth your attention.

Find out more at her website: https://www.dianacolleenauthor.com/

Discuss issues raised here: https://richardsonsrubicon.com/community/season-5-speculative-fiction-where-worlds-meet/should-speculative-fiction-push-moral-boundaries-in-worldbuilding/