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 challenge you to reframe the past, present, and future. Monica is also the author of The…

• 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 is propulsive, this is a story that will suck you in and stick with you long after…

• 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 who helps build the American digital surveillance apparatus out of a genuine sense of patriotism, only…

• 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 can do. The best you can hope to for is to protect your own as 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 external landscapes the protagonist navigates as she tries to find her way in a world where…

• 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 worlds and must learn to harness her power to write changes into reality itself in order to untangle…

• 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 real life, in part because of people who were science fiction fans: the superweapon and the…

• 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 climate change because we can’t get our own act together. We rationalize economic inequality as…

• 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 belies its impact. We complain about the wifi as we soar around the world in…

• 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 twin sinks. The pursuit of rational self-interest is what fuels the economy, right? Where would…