Category: science fiction

• The most useful, beautiful, and dangerous of humanity’s inventions

  Over in the Adjacent Possible, Rick Liebling interviewed me about writing Bandwidth: Planes are computers we fly in. Stoves are computers we cook on. Buildings are computers we inhabit. Nearly every manufactured object has a chip in it, and we deploy sensors to make everything that isn’t already a computer machine-readable. In doing so, we…

• Heroes Are Whoever’s Left When Everyone Else Runs Away

  I interviewed Andy Weir about writing Project Hail Mary. Project Hail Mary follows an unlikely astronaut on a desperate mission to save the solar system from a spacefaring bacteria that eats sunlight. It’s an immensely entertaining adventure that will teach you more real science than you learned in high school. Never has a novel so…

• Ten popular Bandwidth highlights, annotated

  A while back, Goodreads asked me to annotate ten of the most popular Kindle highlights in Bandwidth. I love snatching glimpses into other people’s creative processes, and these notes give you a sneak peek into mine. Let’s dive right in. The highlights from the novel are indented and my notes follow. There was a deeper…

• 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…

• Can speculative fiction teach us anything in a world this crazy?

  Danny Crichton interviewed me for TechCrunch about the feedback loop between imagined worlds and the real one: Current events are a painful reminder that unlike fiction, reality needn’t be plausible. The world is complex and even the wisest of us understand only a tiny sliver of what’s really going on. Nobody knows what comes next.…

• Silence

  Turn it off. The feed was the information infrastructure that empowered nearly every human activity and on which nearly every human activity relied. A talisman that lent mere mortals the power of demigods. Doctors used it for diagnosis. Brokers used it to place bets. Physicists used it to explore the mysteries of quantum entanglement. Farmers…

• The Science of Fiction on Veil

  Maddie Stone published a generous, thoughtful, and mind-expanding essay exploring the implications of the near future extrapolated in my latest novel: Geoengineering, or hacking the planet to cool it down, is either a maniacal plan dreamt up by foolhardy scientists or a useful tool for staving off climate catastrophe—maybe both. It raises hard questions about…

• Making machines human-readable

  The widening gap in basic computer literacy is dangerous. As software eats the world, it becomes ever more important for nontechnical people to grok the fundamentals of how computers work. Users and policy-makers don’t need to be able to read code, but they need to understand its implications or we’ll wind up with counterproductive laws…

• 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…