KAT ROSENFIELD AND STAN LEE WROTE A SUPERHERO NOVEL ABOUT CANCEL CULTURE: A Trick of Light is the result of an unorthodox collaboration between the accomplished young adult novelist and the dying Spider-Man creator.

STAN LEE, THE legendary head of Marvel Comics for decades and a co-creator of characters such as the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, and Spider-Man, died in 2018. But it turns out he still had at least one more book in him.

A Trick of Light was released earlier this year as an audiobook and immediately became a bestseller on Audible. That sparked the release of a print version of the novel, which came out in September. The story follows the adventures of two teenagers: Cameron, a high school senior and would-be YouTube star who gains superpowers after a freak accident on Lake Erie, and Nia, a young hacker shrouded in personal mystery. It's a meditation on virtual and augmented reality, on how the internet has failed to deliver on its promise of facilitating ever greater human connection.

Lee's co-author on the book is Kat Rosenfield. She is the author of two highly acclaimed young adult novels: Amelia Anne Is Dead and Gone and Inland. She is also a former reporter for MTV News and a regular contributor on a wide range of subjects to outlets including New York magazine, Wired, and Playboy.

In September, Rosenfield spoke with Reason's Nick Gillespie about the book, about collaborating with the godfather of superheroes, and about how cancel culture has infiltrated the literary world.

Gillespie: What is A Trick of Light about?

Rosenfield: A Trick of Light is a story centered in digital culture in the internet age. In it we meet a young man named Cameron who's an aspiring YouTube star, and we meet a young woman named Nia whose history and origins are a little bit more mysterious. Together, they form a connection that could either change the world, save the world, or destroy the world entirely.

When the audiobook was released, you told Teen Vogue, "The amazing and also terrible thing about the internet is that it's changing the way we relate to each other, even to the point of warping our own sense of who we are. Cameron and Nia are struggling with the same questions and anxieties that we all experience as a result of inhabiting digital spaces where identity and reality become malleable." Can you talk a little about how our identities and our realities are more malleable than they might have been? Obviously there are some good things and bad things.

This was one of the things that really sparked the novel itself. It was something that fascinated Stan, this question of what becomes more real when we're allowed to create our own realities and create identities within those realities that may or may not line up with who we are in real life. What is the real you? When you go into this virtual space where you've curated your reality and you've decided who gets to be in there with you and you get to decide very much how you're perceived online in a way that you can't necessarily in real life.

It becomes this question: Do you present a more flattering version of yourself? Are you more likable? Are you more provocative? Are you more volatile? Something that I wanted to explore as we were working on this story and something that is probably a familiar experience to a lot of people--and...