Category: Fellow Travelers

• Refracting Reality Into Rainbows of Possibility

  I interviewed Monica Byrne about writing The Actual Star, an epic tale of self-discovery that spans millennia and questions the very meaning of civilization. Born of extensive research into Maya history and culture, this wildly ambitious speculative adventure will …

• Blake Crouch on writing Summer Frost

  Blake Crouch’s Summer Frost is a technothriller in miniature. Only 74 pages long, it conjures a complete, compelling narrative arc through a near-future where a non-player character in a computer game evolves into an autonomous AI. As thought-provoking as it …

• Cory Doctorow on writing Attack Surface

  Cory Doctorow’s new novel, Attack Surface, is inseparable from the zeitgeist—both are riven by insurrection, corruption, misinformation, and inequality—and the near-future it portrays illustrates how technology and politics are inseparable. The story follows a self-taught hacker from San Francisco …

• Kim Stanley Robinson on inventing plausible utopias

  Global pandemic. Raging wildfires. Political upheaval. Never-ending Zooms. Twenty-twenty is the dystopia Hollywood has always dreamed of, sans a satisfying narrative arc.

  In times like these, nihilism beckons. Just give up, history seems to be saying. There’s nothing you …

• Paul McAuley on writing Anthropocene fiction

  Paul McAuley’s Austral is a gorgeous, haunting novel—brimming with fractal stories-within-stories—about a fugitive on the run through the backcountry of the new nation established on a greening Antarctica. McAuley’s unskimmably precise prose conjure the bleak beauty of the internal and

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• Alix E. Harrow on opening doors to other worlds

  Alix E. Harrow can spin a tale. Her debut novel, The Ten Thousand Doors of January, is a no holds barred adventure full of heart and imagination in which a young girl discovers magic doors that lead to other

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• Oliver Morton on science journalism and humanity’s fascination with the moon

  I interviewed Oliver Morton about science writing, the relationship between science and science fiction, and the creative process behind his latest book, The Moon:

  In World War II, two of the signature technologies of science fiction came about in

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• Cory Doctorow on dystopia as a state of mind

  It feels like we’re barreling into dystopia. We elect demagogues who seek to destroy the very institutions they nominally lead. We acquiesce to mass surveillance. We dismiss corruption as “the way things work.” We condemn our grandchildren to suffer accelerating

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• Alexander Weinstein on how technology is changing what it means to be human

  Technology is something we often think about in abstract terms. We read the latest trend reports, keep an eye on new scientific papers, or maybe just browse Wired every once in awhile. We know technology is important. But its prevalence

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• Annalee Newitz on who owns the future

  Ownership often feels like a natural law. We all know what’s ours, and sometimes covet what isn’t. Hedge fund managers trade against each other in an endless cycle of one-upmanship. Kindergarteners refuse to share. Some master bathrooms have jealously guarded

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